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THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 



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PREFACE. 



In preparing this volume on the Countess 
of Albany (which I consider as a kind of 
completion of my previous studies of 
eighteenth-century Italy) I have availed 
myself largely of Baron Alfred von Reu- 
mont^s large work Die Grafin von Albany 
(published in 1862) ; and of the mono- 
graph, itself partially founded on the fore- 
going, of M. Saint Rene Taillandier, en- 
titled La Comtesse (T Albany^ published in 
Paris in 1862. Baron von Reumont^s two 
volumes, written twenty years ago, and 
when the generation which had come 
into personal contact with the Countess 
of Albany had not yet entirely died out ; 
and M. Saint Rene Taillandier^s volume, 



viii PREFACE. 

which embodied the result of his re- 
searches into the archives of the Musee 
Fabre at MontpelHer ; might naturally be 
expected to have exhausted all the infor- 
mation obtainable about the subject of 
their and my studies. This has proved 
to be the case very much less than might 
have been anticipated. The publication, 
by Jacopo Bernardi and Carlo Milanesi, 
of a number of letters of Alfieri to Sienese 
friends, has afforded me an insight into 
Alfieri^s character and his relations with 
the Countess of Albany such as was un- 
attainable to Baron von Reumont and to 
M. Saint Rene Taillandier. The examina- 
tion, by myself and my friend Signor 
Mario Pratesi, of several hundreds of MS. 
letters of the Countess of Albany existing 
in public and private archives at Siena and 
at Milan, has added an important amount 
of what I may call psychological detail, 
overlooked by Baron von Reumont and un- 



PREFACE. IX 

guessed by M. Saint Rene Talllandler. I 
have, therefore, I trust, been able to recon- 
struct the Countess of Albany's spiritual 
likeness during the period — that of her 
early connection with Alfieri — which my 
predecessors have been satisfied to despatch 
in comparatively few pages, counterbalanc- 
ing the thinness of this portion of their bi- 
ographies by a degree of detail concerning 
the Countess' latter years, and the friends 
with whom she then corresponded, which, 
however interesting, cannot be considered 
as vital to the real subject of their works. 
Besides the volumes of Baron von Reu- 
mont and M. Saint Rene Taillandier I have 
depended mainly upon Alfieri's autobiog- 
raphy, edited by Professor Teza, and sup- 
plemented by Bernardi's and Milanesi's 
Lettere di Vittorio Alfieri, published by 
Le Monnier in 1862. Among English 
books that I have put under contribution 
I may mention Klose's Memoirs 0/ Prince 



X PREFACE, 

Charles Edward Stuart (Colburn, 1845), 
Ewaid's Life and Times of Prince Charles 
Stuart (Chapman and Hall, 1875), and Sir 
Horace Mann's Letters to Walpole, edited 
by Dr. Doran. A review, variously attri- 
buted to Lockhart and to Dennistoun, in 
the Quarterly, for 1847, has been all the 
more useful to me as I have been unable to 
procure, writing in Italy, the Tales of a 
Century, of which that paper gives a mas- 
terly account. 

For various details I must refer to 
Charles Dutens' Memoires d'un Voyageur 
qui se repose (Paris, 1806); to Silvagni's 
La Corte e la Societa Romana nel secolo 
XVIII.; to Foscolo's Correspondence, Gino 
Capponi's Ricordi and those of d'Azeglio ; 
to Giordani's works and Benassii Montan- 
ari's Life of Ippolito Pindemonti, besides 
the books quoted by Baron Reumont ; and 
for what I may call the general pervading 
historical coloring (if indeed I have sue- 



PREFACE. XI 

ceeded in giving any) of the background 
against which I have tried to sketch the 
Countess of Albany, Charles Edward and 
Alfieri, I can only refer generally to what 
is now a vague mass of detail accumulated 
by myself during the years of preparation 
for my Studies of the Eighteenth Century 
in Italy, 

My debt to the kindness of persons who 
have put unpublished matter at my dis- 
posal, or helped me to collect various in- 
formation, is a large one^ In the first cat- 
egory, I wish to express my best thanks 
to the Director of the Public Library at 
Siena ; to Cavaliere Guiseppe Porri, a great 
collector of autographs, in the same city ; 
to the Countess Baldelli and Cavaliere 
Emilio Santarelli of Florence, who possess 
some most curious portraits and other 
relics of the Countess of Albany, Prince 
Charles Edward and Alfieri ; and also to 
my friend Count Pierre Boutourline, whose 



xil PREFACE. 

grandfather and great-aunt were among 
Mme. d' Albany's. friends. Among those 
who have kindly given me the benefit of ' 
their advice and assistance, I must mention 
foremost my friend Signor Mario Pratesi, 
the eminent novelist ; and next to him the 
learned Director of the State Archives at 
Florence, Cavaliere Gaetano Milanese, and 
Doctor Guido Biagi, of the Biblioteca Vit- 
torio Emanuel of Rome, without whose 
kindness my work would have been quite 
impossible. 

Florence, 1884. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. • 

PAGE. 

The Bride 15 

CHAPTER II. 
The Bridegroom 32 

CHAPTER III. 
Regina Apostolorum 46 

CHAPTER IV. 
The Heir 56 

CHAPTER V. 
Florence 73 

CHAPTER VI. 
Alfieri Sy 

CHAPTER VII. 
The Cavaliere Servente 106 

CHAPTER VIII. 
The Escape 116 

CHAPTER IX. 
Rome 130 



XIV 


CONTENTS. 
CHAPTER X. 


PAGE, 


Antigone 




. 145 



CHAPTER XI. 
Separation 168 

CHAPTER XII. 

COLMAR . . . .186 

CHAPTER XIII. 
Rue de Bourgoyne 196 

CHAPTER XIV. 
Before the Storm 213 

CHAPTER XV. 
England 227 

CHAPTER XVI. 
The Misogallo 240 

CHAPTER XVII. 
Casa Gianfigliazzi 259 

CHAPTER XVIII. 
Fabre 270 

CHAPTER XIX. 
The Salon of the Countess . . . .281 

CHAPTER XX. 
Santa Croce 299 



THE COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 



CHAPTER I. 



THE BRIDE. 



On the Wednesday or Thursday of Holy Week 
of the year 1772 the inhabitants of the squahd 
and dilapidated little mountain towns between 
Ancona and Loreto were thrown into great 
excitement by the passage of a travelling 
equipage, doubtless followed by two or three 
dependent chaises, of more than usual magnifi- 
cence. 

The people of those parts have little to do 
now-a-days, ^nd must have had still less during 
the pontificate of his Holiness Pope Clement 
XIV. ; and we can imagine how all the windows 
of the unplastered houses, and all the black 
and oozy doorways, must have been lined with 
heads of women and children ; how the prin- 
cipal square of each town, where the horses 
were changed, must have been crowded with 
inquisitive townsfolk and peasants, whispering, 



l6 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

as they hung about the carriages, that the 
great traveller was the young Queen of Eng- 
land going to meet her bridegroom ; a thing to 
be remembered in such world-forgotten places 
as these, and which must have furnished the 
subject of conversation for months and years, 
till that Queen of England and her bridegroom 
had become part and parcel of the tales of the 
** Three Golden Oranges," of the " King of 
Portugal's Cowherd," of the " Wonderful Little 
Blue Bird," and such-like stories in the minds 
of the children of those Apennine cities. The 
Queen of England going to meet her bride- 
groom at the Holy House of Loreto ! The no- 
tion, even to us, does savor strangely of the 
fairy tale. 

What were, meanwhile, the thoughts of the 
beautiful little fairy princess, with laughing 
dark eyes and shining golden hair, and brilliant 
fair skin, more brilliant for the mysterious 
patches of rouge upon the cheeks, and vermil- 
ion upon the lips, whom the more audacious or 
fortunate of the townsfolk caught a glimpse of, 
seated in her gorgeous travelling dress (for the 
eighteenth century was still in its stage of 
pre-revolutionary brocade and gold lace and 
powder and spangles) behind the curtains of 
the coach ? Louise, Princess of Stolberg-Ged- 
ern, and ex-Canoness of Mons, was, if we may 



THE BRIDE. 1/ 

judge by the crayon portrait and the miniature 
done about that time, much more of a child 
than most women of nineteen. A clever and 
accomplished young lady, but, one would say, 
with, as yet, more intelligence and acquired 
pretty little habits and ideas than character ; a 
childish woman of the world, a bright, light 
handful of thistle-bloom. And thus, besides 
the confusion, the unreality due to precipita- 
tion of events and change of scene, the sense 
that she had (how long ago — days, weeks, or 
years } in such a state time becomes a great 
muddle and mystery) been actually married 
by proxy, that she had come the whole way 
from Paris, through Venice and across the 
sea, besides being in this dream-like, phan- 
tasmagoric condition, which must have made 
all things seem light — it is probable that the 
young lady had scarcely sufficient conscious- 
ness of herself as a grown-up, independent, 
independently feeling and thinking creature, to 
feel or think very strongly over her situation. 
It was the regular thing for girls of Louise of 
Stolberg's rank to be put through a certain 
amount of rather vague convent education, as 
she had been at Mons ; to be put through a 
certain amount of balls and parties ; to be put 
through the formality of betrothal and marriage ; 
all this was the half -conscious dream — then 



1 8 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

would come the great waking up. And Louise 
of Stolbergwas, most likely, in a state of feeling 
like that which comes to us with the earliest 
light through the blinds : pleasant or unpleas- 
ant ? We know not which ; still drowsing, 
dreaming, but yet strongly conscious that in a 
moment we shall be awake to reality. 

There was, nevertheless, in the position of 
this girl something which, even in these circum- 
stances, must have compelled her to think, or 
at all events, to meditate, however confusedly, 
upon the present and the future. If she had in 
her the smallest spark of imagination she must 
have felt, to an acute degree, the sort of contin- 
uous surprise, recurring like the tick of a clock, 
which haunts us sometimes with the fact that it 
really does just happen to be ourselves to whom 
some curious lot, some rare combination of the 
numbers in life's lottery, has come. For the 
man whom she was going to marry — nay, to 
whom, in a sense, she was married already — the 
unknown whom she would see for the first time 
that evening, was not the mere typical bride- 
groom, the mere man of rank and fortune, to 
whom, whatever his particular individual shape 
and name, the daughter of a high-born but 
impoverished house had known herself, since 
her childhood, to be devoted. 

Louise Maximilienne Caroline Emanuele, 



THE BRIDE. 1 9 

daughter of the late Prince Gustavus Adolphus 
of Stolberg-Gedern, Prince of the Empire, who 
had died, a Colonel of Maria Theresa, in the 
battle of Leuthen ; and of Elisabeth Philippine, 
Countess of Horn, born at Mons in Hainaut, 
the 20th September, 1752, educated there in 
a convent, and subsequently admitted to the 
half-ecclesiastic, half-worldly dignity of Canoness 
of Ste. Wandru in that town : Louise, Princess 
of Stolberg, now in her twentieth year, had 
been betrothed, and, a few weeks ago, married 
by proxy in Paris to Charles Edward Stuart, 
known to history as the younger Pretender, to 
popular imagination as Bonnie Prince Charlie, 
and to society in the second half of the eight- 
eenth century as the Count of Albany. The 
match had been made up hurriedly — most prob- 
ably without consulting, or dreaming of con- 
sulting, the girl — by her mother, the dowager 
Princess Stolberg, and the Duke of Fitz-James, 
Charles Edward's cousin. The French Min- 
ister, Due d'Aiguilon, in one of those fits of 
preparing Charles Edward as a weapon against 
England, which had more than once cost the 
Pretender so much bitterness, and the Court of 
Versailles so much brazenly endured shame, 
had intimated to the Count of Albany that he 
had better take unto himself a wife. Charles 
Edward had more than once refused ; this time 



20 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

he accepted, and his cousin Fitz-James looked 
around for a possible future Queen of England. 
Now it happened that the eldest son of Fitz- 
James, the Marquis of Jamaica and Duke of 
Berwick, had just married Caroline, the second 
daughter of the widow of Prince Gustavus 
Adolphus of Stolberg-Gedern ; so that the 
choice naturally fell upon this lady's elder sis- 
ter, Louise of Stolberg, the young Canoness of 
Ste. Wandru of Mons. 

The alliance, short of royal birth, was, in the 
matter of dignity, all that could be wished ; the 
Stolbergs were one of the most illustrious 
families of the Holy Roman Empire, in whose 
ser\dce they had discharged many high offices ; 
the Horns, on the other hand, were among the 
most brilliant of the Flemish aristocracy, allied 
to the Gonzagas of Mantua, the Colonna, Or- 
sinis, the Medina Cells, Croys, Lignes, Hohen- 
zollerns, and the house of Lorraine, reigning 
or quasi-reigning families ; and Louise of 
Stolberg's mother was, moreover, on the 
maternal side, the grand-daughter of the Earl 
of Elgin and Ailesbury, a Bruce, and a staunch 
follower of King James H. Such had been 
the inducements in the eyes of the Duke of 
Fitz-James ; and therefore in the eyes of 
Charles Edward, for whom he was commis- 
sioned to select a wife. The inducements to 



THE BRIDE. 21 

the Princess of Stolberg had been even greater. 
Foremost among them was probably the mere 
desire of ridding herself, poor and living as she 
was on the charity of the Empress-Queen, of 
another of the four girls with whom she had 
been left a widow at twenty-five. It had been 
a great blessing to get the two eldest girls, 
Louise and Caroline, educated, housed for a 
time, and momentarily settled in the world by 
their admission to the rich and noble chapter 
of Ste. Wandru : it must have been a great 
blessing to see the second girl married to the 
son of Fitz-James ; it would be a still greater 
one to get Louise safely off her hands, now 
that the third and fourth daughters required to 
be thought of. So far for the desirability of 
any marriage. This particular marriage with 
Prince Charles Edward was, moreover, such as 
to tempt the vanity and ambition of a lady like 
the widowed Princess of Stolberg, conscious of 
her high rank, and conscious, perhaps painfully 
conscious, of the difficulty of living up to its 
requirements. The Count of Albany's grand- 
father had been King of England ; his father, 
the Pretender James, had lived with royal state 
in his exile at Rome, recognized as reigning 
sovereign by the Pope, and even, every now 
and then, by France and Spain. No Govern- 
ment had recognized Charles Edward as King 



22 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

of England ; but, on the other hand, Charles 
Edward had virtually been King of Scotland 
during the '45 : he had been promised the help 
of France to restore him to his rights ; and 
although that help had never been satisfactorily 
given in the past, who could tell whether it 
might not be given at any moment in the 
future ? The ups and downs of politics brought 
all sorts of unexpected necessities ; and .why 
should the French Government, which had 
ignominiously kidnapped and bundled off 
Charles Edward in 1748, have sent for him 
again only a year ago, have urged him to 
marry, unless it had some scheme for reinstat- 
ing him in England? The Duke of Fitz-James 
had doubtless urged these considerations ; he 
had not laid much weight on the fact that 
Charles Edward was thirty-two years older than 
his proposed wife ; still less is it probable that 
he had bade the Princess ofStolberg consider 
that his royal kinsman was said to be neither 
of very good health, nor of very agreeable dis- 
position, nor of very temperate habits ; or, if 
such ideas were presented to the Princess 
Stolberg, she put them behind her. Be it as it 
may, these were matters for the judicious con- 
sideration of a mother ; not, certainly, for the 
thoughts of a daughter. The judicious mother 
decided that such a match was a good one ; 



THE BRIDE. 23 

perhaps, in her heart, she was even over- 
whelmed by the glory which this daughter of 
hers was permitted by Heaven to add to all the 
glories of the illustrious Stolbergs and Horns. 
Anyhow, she accepted eagerly ; so eagerly as 
to forget both gratitude and prudence : for so 
far from consulting her benefactress, Maria 
Theresa, about the advisability of this marriage, 
or asking her sovereign permission for a step 
which might draw upon the Empress-Queen 
some disagreeable diplomatic correspondence 
with England, the Princess of Stolberg kept 
the matter close, and did not even announce 
the marriage to the Court of Vienna; yet she 
must have foreseen what occurred, namely, 
that Maria Theresa, mortified not merely in 
her dignity as a sovereign, but also, and per- 
haps more, in her ruling passion of benevolent 
meddlesomeness, would suspend the pension 
which formed a large portion of the Princess' 
income, and compel her to the abject apology 
before restoring it. The marriage with Charles 
Edward Stuart was worth all that ! 

Louise of Stolberg was probably well aware 
of the extreme glory of the marriage for which 
she had been reserved. The Fitz-Jameses, in 
virtue of their illegitimate descent from James 
H., considered themselves and were considered 
as a sort of princes of the blood ; and as such 



24 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

they doubtless impressed Louise with a great 
notion of the glory of the Stuarts, and the 
absolute legitimacy of their claims. On his 
marriage Charles Edward assumed the title, 
and attempted to assume the position, of King 
of England ; so his bride must have consid- 
ered herself as the wife not merely of the 
Count of Albany, but of Charles III., King of 
Great Britain, France and Ireland. She was 
going to be a queen ! We must try, we demo- 
cratic creatures of a time when kings and 
queens may perfectly be adventurers and 
adventuresses, to put ourselves in the place of 
this young lady of a century ago, brought up 
as a dignitary of a chapter into which admis- 
sion depended entirely upon the number and 
quality of quarterings of the candidate's 
esutcheon, under a superior — the Abbess of 
Ste. Wandru — who was the sister of the late 
Emperor Francis, the sister-in-law of Maria 
Theresa ; we must try and conceive an institu- 
tion something between a school, a sisterhood 
and a club, in which the ruling idea, the 
source of all dignity, jealousy, envy and tri- 
umph, was greatness of birth and connection ; 
we must try and do this in order to understand 
what, to Louise of Stolberg, was the full value 
of the fact of becoming the wife of Charles 
Edward Stuart. One hundred and twelve years 



THE BRIDE. 2$ 

ago, and seventeen years before the great 
revolution which yawns, an almost impass- 
able gulf, between us and the men and women 
of the past, a woman, a girl of nineteen, and a 
Canoness of Ste. Wandru of Mons, need have 
been of no base temper, if, on the eve of such 
a wedding as this one, her mind had been full 
of only one idea ; the idea, monotonous and 
drowningly loud like some big cathedral bell, 
** I shall be a queen. " But if Louise of Stol- 
berg was, as is most probable, in some such a 
state of vague exultation, we must remember 
also that there may well have entered into 
such exultation an element with which even 
we, and even the most austerely or snobbishly 
democratic among us, might fully have sympa- 
thized. Her mother, her sister, her brother-in- 
law, and the old Duke of Fitz-James, who had 
made up her marriage and married her by 
proxy, and every other person who had 
approached her during the last month, must 
have been filling the mind of Louise of Stol- 
berg with tales of the '45 and of the heroism of 
Prince Charlie. And her mind, which, as after- 
wards appeared, was romantic, fascinated by 
eccentricity and genius, may easily have 
become enamored of the bridegroom who 
awaited her, the last of so brilliant and ill-fated 
a race, the hero of Gladsmuir and Falkirk, at 



26 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

whose approach the Londoners had shut their 
shops in terror, and the Hanoverian usurper 
ordered his yacht to lie ready moored at the 
Tower steps ; the more than royal young man 
whom (as the Jacobites doubtless told her) 
only the foolish and traitorous obstinacy of 
his followers had prevented from reinstating 
his father on the throne of England. Histori- 
cal figures, especially those of a heroic sort, 
remain pictured in men's minds at their 
moment of glory ; and this was the case partic- 
ularly with the young Pretender, who had dis- 
appeared into well-nigh complete mystery after 
his wonderful exploits and hairbreadth escapes 
of the '45 ; so that in the eyes of Louise of 
Stolberg the man she was about to fnarry ap- 
peared most probably but little changed from 
the brilliant youth who had marched on foot at 
the head of his army towards London, who had 
held court at Holyrood and roamed in disguise 
about the Hebrides. 

Still, it is difficult to imagine that as the 
hours of meeting drew nearer, the little Prin- 
cess, as her travelling carriage toiled up the 
Apennine valleys, did not feel some terror of 
the future and the unknown. The spring 
comes late to those regions ; in the middle of 
April the blackthorn is scarcely budding on 
the rocks, the violets are still plentiful under- 



THE BRIDE. 27 

neath the leafless roadside hedges ; scarcely a 
faint yellow, more like autumn than spring, is 
beginning to tinge the scraggy outlines of the 
poplars, which rise in spectral regiments out of 
the river beds. Wherever the valley widens, 
or the road gains some hill-crest, a huge peak 
white with newly-fallen snow confronts you, 
closes in the view, bringing bleakness and bit- 
terness curiously home to the feelings. These 
valleys, torrent-tracks betwen the steep rocks 
of livid basalt or bright red sandstone, bare as 
a bone or thinly clothed with ilex and juoiper 
scrub, are inexpressibly lonely and sad, espe- 
cially at this time of the year. You feel impri- 
soned among the rocks in a sort of catacomb 
open to the sky, where the shadows gather in 
the early afternoon, and only the light on the 
snow-peaks and on the high-sailing clouds tells 
you that the sun is still in the heavens. Vil- 
lages there seem none ; and you may drive for 
an hour without meeting more than a stray 
peasant cutting scrub or quarrying gravel on 
the hill-side, a train of mules carrying charcoal 
or fagots ; the towns are far between, bleak, 
black, filthy, and such as only to make you feel 
all the more poignantly the utter desolateness 
of these mountains. No sadder way of enter- 
ing Italy can well be imagined than landing 
at Ancona and crossing through the Apen- 



28 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

nines to Rome in the early spring. To a girl 
accustomed to the fat flatness of Flanders, to 
the market bustle of a Flemish provincial town, 
this journey must have been overwhelmingly 
dreary and dismal. During these long hours, 
dragging up these Apennine valleys, did a 
shadow fall across the mind of the pretty, fair- 
haired, brilliant-complexioned little Canoness of 
Mons, a shadow like the cold melancholy blue 
which filled the valleys between the sun-smitten 
peaks ? And did it ever occur to her, as the 
horses were changed in the little post-towns, 
that it was in honor of Holy Week that the 
savage-looking bearded men, the big, brawny. 
Madonna-like women, had got on their best 
clothes ? Did it strike her that the unplas- 
tered church fronts were draped in black, the 
streets strewn with laurel and box as if for a 
funeral, that the bells were silent in their tow- 
ers ? Perhaps not ; and yet when a few years 
later the Countess of Albany was already wont 
to say that her married life had been just such 
as befitted a woman who had gone to the altar 
on Good Friday, she must have remembered, 
and the remembrance must have seemed 
fraught with ill omen, that last day of her girl- 
hood, travelling through the black deserted 
valleys of the March, through the world-for- 
gotten mountain-towns with their hushed bells 



THE BRIDE, 29 

and black-draped churches and funereally- 
strewn streets. 

At Loreto — where, as a good Catholic, the 
Princess Louise of Stolberg doubtless prayed 
for a blessing on her marriage, in the great 
sanctuary which encloses with silver and carved 
marble the little house of the Virgin — at Lo- 
reto the bride was met by a Jacobite dignitary, 
Lord Carlyle, and five servants in the crimson 
liveries of England. At Macerata, one of the 
larger towns of the March of Ancona, she was 
awaited by her bridegroom. A noble family 
of the province, the Compagnoni-Marefoschis, 
one of whom, a cardinal, was an old friend of 
the Stuarts, had placed their palace at the dis- 
posal of the royal pair. We most of us know 
what such palaces, in small Italian provincial 
towns south of the Apennines, are apt to be ; 
huge, gloomy, shapeless masses of brickwork and 
mouldering plaster, something between a me- 
diaeval fortress and a convent ; great black arch- 
ways, where the refuse of the house and the 
filth of the town have peaceably accumulated 
(and how much more in those days) ; magnifi- 
cent statued staircases given over to the few 
servants who have replaced the armed bravos of 
two centuries ago ; long suites of rooms, vast, 
resounding like so many churches, glazed in the 
last century with tiny squares of bad glass^ 



30 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

through which the light comes green and thick 
as through sea-water ; carpets still despised as 
a new-fangled luxury from France ; the walls, 
not cheerful with eighteenth-century French 
panel and hangings, but covered with big naked 
frescoed men and women, or faded arras ; few 
fire-places, but those few enormous, looking like 
a huge red cavern in the room. The Mare- 
foschis had got together all their best furniture 
and plate, and the palace was filled with torches 
ai\d wax lights ; a funereal illumination in a 
funereal place, it must have seemed to the lit- 
tle Princess of Stolberg, fresh from the brilliant 
nattiness ot the Parisian houses of the time of 
Louis XV. 

The bride alighted ; a small, plump, well- 
proportioned, rather childish creature, with still 
half-formed childish features, a trifle snub, a 
trifle soulless, very pretty, tender, light-hearted ; 
a charming little creature, very well made to 
steal folks' hearts unconscious to themselves 
and to herself. 

The bridegroom met her. A faded, but 
extremely characteristic crayon portrait, the 
companion of the one of which I have already 
spoken, now in the possession of Cavaliere 
Emilio Santarelli (the only man still living who 
can remember that same Louise d'Albany), a 
portrait evidently taken at this time, has shown 



THE BRIDE. 3 1 

me what that bridegroom must have been. The 
man who met Louise of Stolberg at Macerata 
as her husband and master, the man who had 
once been Bonnie Prince Charlie, was tall, big- 
boned, guant, and prematurely bowed for his 
age of fifty-two ; dressed usually, and doubtless 
on this occasion, with the blue ribbon and star, 
in a suit of crimson watered silk, which threw 
up a red reflection into his red and bloated face. 
A red face, but of a livid, purplish red suffused 
all over the heavy furrowed forehead to where 
it met tht white wig, all over the flabby cheeks, 
hanging in big loose folds upon the short, loose- 
folded red neck ; massive features, but coars- 
ened and drawn ; and dull, thick, silent-looking 
lips, of purplish red scarce redder than the red 
skin ; pale blue eyes tending to a watery gray- 
ness, leaden, vague, sad, but with angry streak- 
ings of red ; something inexpressibly sad, 
gloomy, helpless, vacant and debased in the 
whole face: such was the man who awaited 
Louise of Stolberg in the Compagnoni-Marefos- 
chi palace at Macerata, and who, on Good 
Friday, the 17th of April, 1772, wedded her 
in the palace chapel and signed his name in the 
register as Charles IIL, King of Great Britain, 
France and Ireland. 



CHAPTER 11. 

THE BRIDEGROOM. 

On the Wednesday after Easter the bride and 
bridegroom made their solemn entry into 
Rome; the two travelling carriages of the 
Prince and of the Princess were drawn by six 
horses ; four gala coaches, carrying the attend- 
ants of Charles Edward and of his brother the 
Cardinal Duke of York, followed behind, and 
the streets were cleared by four outriders 
dressed in scarlet with the white Stuart cock- 
ade. The house to which Louise of Stolberg, 
now Louise d' Albany, or rather, as she signed 
herself at this time, Louise R., was conducted 
after her five days' wedding journey, has passed 
through several hands since belonging to the 
Sacchettis, the Muti Papazzurris, and now-a- 
days to the family of About' s charming and 
unhappy ToUa Ferraldi. Clement XI. had 
given or lent it to the elder Pretender : James 
III., as he was styled in Italy, had settled in it 
about 1 7 19 with his beautiful bride, Maria 
Clementina Sobieska, romantically filched by 



THE BRIDEGROOM, 33 

her Jacobites from the convent at Innsbruck, 
where the Emperor Charles VI. had hoped to 
restrain her from so compromising a match ; 
here, in the year 1720, Charles Edward had 
been born and had his baby fingers kissed by 
the whole sacred college ; and here the so-called 
King of England had died at last, a melancholy 
hypochondriac, in 1766. The palace closes in 
the narrow end of the square of the Santissimi 
Apostoli, stately and quiet with its various 
palaces, Colonna, Odescalchi, and whatever else 
their names, and its pillared church front. 
There is a certain aristocratic serenity about 
that square, separated, like a big palace yard, 
from the bustling Corso in front ; yet to me 
there remains, a tradition of my childhood, a 
sort of grotesque and horrid suggestiveness 
connected with this peaceful and princely 
corner of Rome. For, many years ago, when 
the square of the Santissimi Apostoli was still 
periodically strewn with sand that the Pope 
might not be jolted when his golden coach 
drove up to the church, and when the names of 
Charles Edward and his Countess were curious- 
ly mixed up in my brain with those of Charles 
the First and Mary Queen of Scots, there used 
to be in a little street leading out of the square 
towards the Colonna Gardens, a dark recess in 
the blank church wall, an embrasure, sheltered 



34 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

by a pent-house roof and raised like a stage a 
few steep steps above the pavement ; and in it 
loomed, strapped to a chair, dark in the shadow, 
a creature in a long black robe and a skull- 
cap drawn close over his head ; a vague, con- 
torted, writhing and gibbering horror, of whose 
St. Vitus twistings and mouthings we children 
scarcely ventured to catch a glimpse as we 
hurried up the narrow street, followed by the 
bestial cries and moans of the solitary maniac. 
This weird and grotesque sight, more weird 
and more grotesque seen through a muddled 
childish fancy and through the haze of years, 
has remained associated in my mind with that 
particular corner of Rome, where, with windows 
looking down upon that street, upon that blank 
church wall with its little black recess, the 
palace of the Stuarts closes in the narrow end 
of the square of the Santissimi Apostoli. And 
now, I cannot help seeing a certain strange ap- 
propriateness in the fact that the image of that 
mouthing and gesticulating half-witted creature 
should be connected in my mind with the house 
to which, with pomp of six-horse coaches and 
scarlet outriders, Charles Edward Stuart con- 
ducted his bride. 

For the beautiful and brilliant youth who had 
secretly left that palace twenty-four years 
before to reconquer his father's kingdom, the 



THE BRIDEGROOM. 35 

gentle and gallant and chivalric young prince 
of whose irresistible manner and voice the 
canny chieftains had vainly bid each other 
beware, when he landed with his handful of 
friends and called the Highlanders to arms ; the 
patient and heroic exile, singing to his friends 
when the sea washed over their boat and the 
Hanoverian soldiers surrounded their cavern or 
hovel, who had silently given Miss Macdonald 
that solemn kiss which she treasured for more 
than fifty years in her strong heart — that 
Charles Edward Stuart was now a creature not 
much worthier and not much less repulsive than 
the poor idiot whom I still see, flinging about 
his palsied hands and gobbling with his speech- 
less mouth, beneath the windows of the Stuart 
palace. The taste for drinking, so strange in a 
man brought up to the age of twenty-three 
among the proverbially sober Italians, had 
arisen in Charles Edward, a most excusable 
ill habit in one continually exposed to wet and 
cold, frequently sleeping on the damp ground, 
ill-fed, anxious, worn out by over-exertion in 
flying before his enemies, during those frightful 
months after the defeat at Culloden, when, 
with a price of thirty thousand pounds upon his 
head, he had lurked in the fastnesses of the 
Hebrides. We hear that on the eve of his final 
escape from Scotland, his host, Macdonald of 



36 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

Kingsburgh, prevented the possible miscarriage 
of all their perilous plans only by smashing the 
punch-bowl over which the Pretender, already 
more than half drunk, had insisted upon spend- 
ing the night. Still more significant is the 
fact, recorded by Hugh Macdonald of Balshair, 
that when Charles Edward was concealed in a 
hovel in the isle of South Uist, the prince and 
his faithful followers continued drinking (the 
words are Balshair's own) " for three days and 
three nights." Hard drinking was, we all know, 
a necessary accomplishment in the Scotland of 
those days ; and hard drinking, we must all of 
us admit, may well have been the one comfort 
and resource of a man undergoing the frightful 
mental and bodily miseries of those months of 
lying at bay. But Charles Edward did not 
relinquish the habit when he was back again in 
safety and luxury. Strangely compounded of 
an Englishman and a Pole, the Polish element, 
the brilliant and light-hearted chivalry, the 
cheerful and youthfully wayward heroism which 
he had inherited from the Sobieskis, seemed to 
constitute the whole of Charles Edward's na- 
ture when he was young and for all his reverses 
still hopeful : as he grew older, as deferred and 
disappointed hopes, and endured ignominy, 
made him a middle-aged man before his time, 
then also did the other hereditary strain, the 



THE BRIDEGROOM. Z7 

morose obstinacy, the gloomy brutality of James 
II. and of his father begin to appear, and grad- 
ually obliterated every trace of what had been 
the splendor and charm of the Prince Charlie 
of the '45. Disappointed of the assistance of 
France, which had egged him to this great 
enterprise only to leave him shamefully in the 
lurch, Charles Edward had, immediately upon 
the peace of Aix la Chapelle, become an em- 
barrassing guest of Louis XV., and a guest of 
whom the victorious English were continually 
requiring the ignominious dismissal ; until, 
wearied by the indifference to all hints and 
orders to free France from his compromising 
presence, the Court of Versailles had descended 
to the incredible baseness of having the Prince 
kidnapped as he was going to the opera, bound 
hand and foot, carried like a thief to the fortress 
of Vincennes, and then conducted to the fron- 
tier like a suspected though unconvicted swin- 
dler or other public nuisance. 

This indignity, coming close upon the 
irreparable blow dealt to the Jacobite cause by 
the stupid selfishness which impelled Charles 
Edward's younger brother to become a Romish 
priest and a cardinal, appears to have definitive- 
ly decided the extraordinary change in the 
character of the young Pretender. During the 
many years of skulking, often completely lost 



38 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

to the sight both of Jacobite adherents and of 
Hanoverian spies, which followed upon that 
outrage of the year 1748, the few glimpses 
which we obtain of Charles Edward show us 
only a precociously aged, brutish and brutal sot, 
obstinate in disregarding all efforts to restore 
him to a worthier life, yet not obstinate enough 
to refuse unnecessary pecuniary aid from the 
very government and persons by whom he had 
been so cruelly outraged. We hear that 
Charles Edward's confessor, with whom, despite 
his secret abjuration of Catholicism, he con- 
tinued to associate, was a notorious drunkard ; 
and that the mistress with whom he lived for 
many years, and whom he even passed off as 
his wife, was also addicted to drinking; nay. 
Lord Elcho is said to have witnessed a tipsy 
squabble between the young Pretender and 
Miss Walkenshaw, the lady in question, across 
the table of a low Paris tavern. 

The reports of the many spies whom the 
English Government set everywhere on his 
traces are constant and unanimous in one item 
of information : the Prince began to drink 
early in the morning, and was invariably dead 
drunk by the evening ; nay, some letters of 
Cardinal York, addressed to an unknown Jacob- 
ite, speak of the "nasty bottle, that goes on 
but too much, and certainly must at last kill 



THE BRIDEGROOM. 39 

him." But, although drunkenness undoubtedly 
did much to obliterate whatever still remained 
of the hero of the '45, it was itself only one of 
the proofs of the strange metamorphosis which 
had taken place in his character. We cannot 
admit the plea of some of his biographers, who 
would save his honor at the price of his reason. 
Charles Edward was the victim neither of a 
hereditary vice nor of a mental disease ; drink 
was in his case not a form of madness, but 
merely the ruling passion of a broken-spirited 
and degraded nature. He had the power when 
he married, and even much later in life, when 
he sent for his illegitimate daughter, of refrain- 
ing from his usual excesses ; his will, impaired 
though it was, still existed, and what was 
wanting in the sad second half of his career 
was not resolution, but conscience, pride, an 
ideal, anything which might beget the desire of 
reform. The curious mixture of brow-beating 
moroseness with a brazen readiness to accept 
and even extort favors, he would appear, as he 
ceased to be young, to have gradually inherited 
from his father; he was ready to live on the 
alms of the French Court, while never losing an 
opportunity of declaiming against the ignoble 
treatment which that same Court had inflicted 
on him. He became sordid and grasping in 
money matters, basely begging for money, 



40 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

which he did not require, from those who, like 
Gustavus III. of Sweden, discovered only too 
late that he was demeaning himself from avarice 
and not from necessity. While keeping a cer- 
tain maudlin sentiment about his exploits and 
those of his followers, which manifested itself 
in cruelly pathetic scenes — when, as in his old 
age, people talked to him of the Highlands 
and the Rebellion — he was wholly without any 
sense of his obligation towards men who had 
exposed their life and happiness for him, of the 
duty which bound him to repay their devotion 
by docility to their advice, by sacrifice of his 
inclinations, or even by such mere decency of 
behavior as would spare them the bitterness of 
allegiance to a disreputable and foul-mouthed 
sot. But until the moment when, too old and 
dying, he placed himself in the strong hands 
of his natural daughter, Charles Edward seems 
to have been, however obstinate in his favor- 
itism, incapable of any real affection. When 
his brother Henry became a priest Charles held 
aloof for long years both from him and from 
his father ; and this resentment of what was 
after all a mere piece of bigoted folly, may be 
partially excused by the fact that the identifica- 
tion of his family with Popery had seriously 
damaged the prospects of Jacobitism. But the 
lack of all lovingness in his nature is proved 



THE BRIDEGROOM. 41 

beyond possibility of doubt by the brutal manner 
in which, while obstinately refusing to part with 
his mistress at the earnest entreaty of his 
adherents, he explained to their envoy Macna- 
mara that his refusal was due merely to resent- 
ment at any attempted interference in his 
concerns ; but that, for the rest, he had not the 
smallest affection or consideration remaining 
for the woman they wished to make him relin- 
quish. As if all the stupid selfishness bred of 
centuries of royalty had accumulated in this 
man who might be king only through his own and 
his adherents' magnanimity, Charles Edward 
seemed, in the second period of his life, to feel 
as if he had a right over everything, and 
nobody else had a right over anything ; all 
sense of reciprocity was gone ; he would accept 
devotion, self-sacrifice, generosity, charity — 
nay, he would even insist upon them ; but he 
would give not one tittle in return ; so that, 
forgetful of the heroism and clemency and 
high spirit of his earlier days, one might almost 
think that his indignant answer to Cardinal de 
Tencin, who offered him England and Scotland 
if he would cede Ireland to France, " Every- 
thing or nothing, Monsieur le Cardinal ! " was 
dictated less by the indignation of an English- 
man than by the stubborn graspingness of a 
Stuart. 



42 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

His further behavior towards Miss Walken- 
shaw shows the same indifference to everything 
except what he considered his own rights. He 
had crudely admitted that he cared nothing for 
her, that it was only because his adherents 
wished her dismissal that he did not pack her 
off ; and subsequently he seems to have given 
himself so little thought either for his mistress 
or for his child by her, that, without the benev- 
olence of his brother the Cardinal, they might 
have starved. But when, after long endurance 
of his jealousy and brutality, after being watched 
like a prisoner and beaten like a slave, the 
wretched woman at length took refuge in a con- 
vent, Charles Edward's rage knew no bounds ; 
and he summoned the French Government, 
despite his old quarrel with it, to kidnap and 
send back the woman over whom he had no 
legal rights, and certainly no moral ones, with 
the obstinacy and violence of a drunken navvy 
clamoring for the wife whom he has well-nigh 
done to death. Beyond the mere intemperance 
and the violence born of intemperance which 
made Charles Edward's name a by-word and 
served the Hanoverian dynasty better than all 
the Duke of Cumberland's gibbets, there was 
at the bottom of the Pretender's character — ■ 
his second character at least, his character after 
the year 1750 — heartlessness and selfishness, 



THE BRIDEGROOM. 43 

an absence of all ideal and all gratitude, much 
more morally repulsive than any mere vice, and 
of which the vice which publicly degraded him 
was the result much more than the cause. The 
curse of kingship in an age when royalty had 
lost all utility, the habit of irresponsibility, of 
indifference, the habit of always claiming and 
never giving justice, love, self-sacrifice, all the 
good things of this world, this curse had lurked, 
an evil strain, in the nature of this king without 
a kingdom, and had gradually blighted and 
made hideous what had seemed an almost heroic 
character. Royal-souled Charles Edward Stuart 
had certainly been in his youth ; brilliant with 
all those virtues of endurance, clemency and 
affability which the earlier eighteenth century 
still fondly associated with the divine right of 
kings ; and royal-souled, hard and weak with all 
the hardness and weakness, the self-indulgence, 
obstinacy, and thoughtlessness for others of 
effete races of kings, he had become, no less 
certainly, in the second part of his life ; branded 
with God's own brand of unworthiness, which 
signifies that a people, or a class, or a family is 
doomed to extinction. 

Such was the man to whom the easy-going 
habit of the world, the perfectly self-righteous 
indifference to a woman's happiness or honor 
of the well-bred people of that day, gave over 



44 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

as a partner for life a half-educated, worldly- 
ignorant and absolutely will-less young girl of 
nineteen and a half, who doubtless considered 
herself extremely fortunate in being chosen for 
so brilliant a match. 

There is a glamor, even for us, connected 
with the name of Charles Edward Stuart ; in 
his youth he forms a brilliant speck of roman- 
tic light in that dull eighteenth century, a spot 
of light surrounded by the halo of glory of the 
devotion which he inspired and the enthusiasm 
which he left behind him. We feel, in a way, 
grateful to him almost as we might feel grateful 
to a clever talker, a beautiful woman, a bright 
day, as to something pleasing and enlivening 
to our fancy. But the brilliant effect which 
has pleased us is like some gorgeous pagearlt 
connected with the worship of a stupid and 
ferocious divinity ; nay, rather, if we let our 
thoughts dwell upon the matter, if we remem- 
ber how, while the prisons and ship-holds were 
pestilent with the Jacobite men and women 
penned up like cattle in obscene promiscuity, 
while the mutilated corpses were lying still 
green, piled up under the bog turf of Culloden, 
while so many of the bravest men of Scotland, 
who had supplicated the young Pretender not 
to tempt them to a hopeless enterprise, were 
cheerfully mounting the scaffold "for so 



THE BRIDEGROOM. 45 

sweet a prince," Charles Edward was dancing 
at Versailles in his crimson silk dress and dia- 
monds, with his black-eyed boast, the eldest- 
born Princess of France; — nay, worse, if we 
remember how the man, for whose love and 
whose right so much needless agony had been 
expended, let himself become a disgrace to the 
very memory of the men who had died for him : 
if we bear all this in mind, Charles Edward 
seems to have become a mere irresponsible and 
fated representative of some evil creed ; the 
idol, at first fair-shapen and smiling, then hide- 
ous and loathsome, to which human sacrifices 
are brought in solemnity ; a glittering idol of 
silver, or a foul idol of rotten wood, but without 
nerves and mind to perceive the weeping all 
around, the sop of blood at its feet. And now 
after the sacrifice of so many hundreds of brave 
men to this one man comes the less tragic, less 
heroic, perfectly legitimate and correct sacrifice 
to him of a pretty young woman, not brave and 
not magnanimous, but very fit for innocent 
enjoyment and very fit for honorable love. 



CHAPTER III. 

REGINA APOSTOLORUM. 

Charles Edward had refrained from drink, or 
at least refrained from any excesses, in honor 
of his marriage. Perhaps the notion that 
P'rance was again taking him up, a notion well 
founded, since France had bid him marry and 
have an heir, and the recollection of the near 
miscarriage of all his projects, thanks to having 
presented himself, a year before, to the French 
Minister so drunk that he could neither speak 
nor be spoker^ to, perhaps the old hope of be- 
coming after all a real king, had turned the 
Pretender into a temporarily-reformed character. 
Or, perhaps, weary of the -life of melancholy 
solitude, of debauched squalor, of the moral 
pig-sty in which he had been rotting so many 
years, the idea of decency, of dignity, of society, 
of a wife and children and friends, may have 
made him capable of a strong resolution. Per- 
haps, also, the unfamiliar, wonderful presence 
of a beautiful and refined young woman, of 
something to adore, or at least to be jealous and 



REGINA APOSTOLORUM. 47 

vain of, may have wakened whatever still 
remained of the gallant and high-spirited Polish 
nature in this morose and besotten old Stua'rt. 
Be this as it may, Charles Edward, however 
degraded, was able to command himself when 
he chose, and, for one reason or another, he did 
choose to command himself and behave like a 
tolerably decent man and husband during the 
first few months following on his marriage. 
Besides the redness of his face, the leaden suf- 
fused look of his eyes, the vague air of degrada- 
tion all about him, there was perhaps nothing, 
at first, that revealed to Louise, Queen of 
Great Britain, France and Ireland, that her 
husband was a drunkard and well-nigh a 
maniac. Engaging he certainly could not have 
been, however much he tried (and we know he 
tried hard) to show his full delight at having 
got so charming a little wife ; indeed, it is easy 
to imagine that if anything might inspire even 
a properly educated and high-born young 
Flemish or German lady of the eighteenth 
century with somewhat of a sense of loathing, 
it must have been the assiduities and endear- 
ments of a man such as Charles Edward. But 
Louise of Stolberg had doubtless absorbed, 
from her mother, from her older fellow-can- 
onesses, nay, from the very school-girls in the 
convent where she had been educated, all 



48 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

proper views, negative and positive, on the 
subject of marriage; nor must we give to a 
girl who was probably still too much of a child, 
too much of an unromantic little woman of the 
world, undeserved pity on account of degrada- 
tion which she had most probably, as yet, not 
sufficient moral nerve to appreciate. Her 
husband was old, he was ugly, he was not 
attractive ; he may have been tiresome and 
rather loathsome in his constant attendance; 
he may even have smelt of brandy every now 
and then ; but as marriages had been invented 
in order to give young women a position in the 
world, husbands were not expected to be much 
more than drawbacks to the situation ; and as to 
the sense of life-long dependence upon an indi- 
vidual, as to the desire for love and sympathy, 
it was still too early in the eighteenth, century, 
and perhaps, also, too early in the life of a half- 
Flemish, half-German girl, very childish still in 
aspect, and brought up in the worldly wisdom 
of a noble chapter of canonesses, to expect 
anything of that kind. 

There must, however, from the very begin- 
ning, have been something unreal and uncanny 
in the girl's situation. The huge old palace, 
crammed with properties of dead Stuarts and 
Sobieskis, with its royal throne and dai's in the 
ante-room, its servants in the royal liveries of 



REGINA APOSTOLORUM. 49 

England, must have been full of rather lugu- 
brious memories. Here James III. of England 
and VI 1 1, of Scotland had moped away his 
bitter old age ; here, years and years ago, 
Charles Edward's mother, the beautiful and 
brilliant grand-daughter of John Sobieski, had 
pined away, bullied and cajoled back from the 
convent in which she had taken refuge, per- 
petually outraged by the violence of her 
husband and the insolence of his mistress ; it 
was an ill-omened sort of place for a bride. 
Around extended the sombre and squalid Rome 
of the second half of the eighteenth century, 
with its huge ostentatious rococo palaces and 
churches, its strangled, black and filthy streets, 
its ruins still embedded in nettles and filth, its 
population seemingly composed only of monks 
and priests (for all men of the middle classes 
wore the black dress and short hair of the 
clergy), or of half-savage peasants and work- 
men, bearded creatures, in wonderful em- 
broidered vests and scarfs, looking exceedingly 
like brigands, as Bartolomeo Pinelli etched them 
even some thirty years later; — a town where 
every doorway was a sewer by day and a possi- 
ble hiding-place for thieves by night ; where no 
woman durst cross the street alone after dusk, 
and no man dared to walk home unattended 
after nine or ten ; where, driving about in her 



so COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

gilded state coach of an afternoon, the Pre- 
tender's bride must often have met a knot of 
people conveying a stabbed man (the average 
gave more than one assassination per day) to 
t^e nearest barber or apothecary, the blood of 
file murdered man mingling, in the black ooze, 
about the rough cobble-stones over which the 
coaches jolted, with the blood trickling from 
the disembowelled sheep hanging, ghastly in 
their fleeces, from the hooks outside the 
butchers' and cheesemongers' shops ; or re- 
turning home at night from the opera, amid the 
flare of the footmen's torches, must have heard 
the distant cries of some imprudent person 
struggling in the hands of marauders ; or, again, 
on Sundays and holidays have been stopped by 
the crowd gathered round the pillory where 
some too easy-going husband sat crowned with 
a paper cap in a hail-storm of mud and egg- 
shells and fruit-peelmgs, round the scaffold 
where some petty offender was being flogged 
by the hangman, until the fortunate appearance 
of a clement cardinal or the rage of the sym- 
pathizing mob put a stop to the proceedings. 
Barbarous as we remember the Rome of the 
Popes, we must imagine it just a hundred times 
more barbarous, more squalid, picturesque, 
filthy and unsafe if we would know what it was 
a hundred years ago. 



REGINA APOSTOLORUM. 5 1 

But in this barbarous Rome there were 
things more beautiful and wonderful to a young 
Flemish lady of the eighteenth century than 
they could possibly be to us, indifferent and 
much-cultured creatures of the nineteenth 
century, who know that most art is corrupt and 
most music trashy. 

The private galleries of Rome were then in 
process of formation ; pictures which had hung 
in dwelling-rooms were being assembled in 
those beautiful gilded and stuccoed saloons, 
with their outlook on to the cloisters of a court, 
or the ilex tops or orange espaliers of a garden, 
filled with the faint splash of the fountains 
outside, the spectral, silvery chiming of musical 
clocks, where, unconscious of the thousands of 
beings who would crowd in there armed with 
guide-books and opera-glasses in the days to 
come, only stray foreigners were to be met, 
foreigners who most likely were daintily em- 
broidered and powdered aristocrats from Eng- 
land or Germany, if they were not men like 
Wincklemann, or Goethe, or Beckford. It was 
the great day, also, for excavations ; the vast 
majority of antiques which we now see in 
Rome having been dug up at that period ; and 
among the ilexes of the Ludovisi and Albani 
gardens, among the laurels and rough grass of 
the Vatican hill, porticoes were being built, and 



52 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

long galleries and temple-like places, where a 
whole people of marble might live among the 
newly-found mosaics and carved altars and 
vases. Moreover, there was at that time in 
Rome a thing of which there is now less in 
Rome than anywhere, perhaps, in the world — 
a thing for which English and Germans came 
expressly to Italy : there was music. A large 
proportion of the best new operas were brought 
out in Rome — always four or five new ones in 
each season ; and the young singers from the 
conservatorios of Naples came to the ecclesias- 
tical city, where no actresses were suffered, to 
begin their career in the hoop skirts and stom- 
achers and toiLpes with which the eighteenth 
century was wont to conceive the heroines of 
ancient Greece and Rome. The bride of 
Charles Edward was herself a tolerable musi- 
cian and she had a taste for painting and sculp- 
ture which developed into a perfect passion in 
after-life ; so, with respect to art, there was 
plenty to amuse her. 

It was different with regard to society. By 
insisting upon royal honors such as had been 
enjoyed by his father, but which the Papal 
Court, anxious to keep on good terms with 
England, absolutely refused to give him, the 
Pretender had virtually cut himself and his 
wife out of all Roman society ; for he would. 



REGINA APOSrOLORUM. 53 

not know the nobles on a footing of equality, 
and they, on the other hand, dared know him 
on no other. The great entertainments in the 
palaces where Charles Edward had so often 
danced, the admired of all beholders, in his 
boyhood, were not for the Count and Countess 
of Albany. There remained the theatres and 
public balls to which the Pretender conducted 
his wife with the assiduity of a man immensely 
vain of having on his arm a woman far too 
young and pretty for his deserts. And, besides 
this, there was a certain amount of vague, shift- 
ing foreign society, nobles on the loose, and 
young men on their grand tour, who mostly 
considered that a visit to the Palazzo Muti, or 
at least a seemingly accidental meeting and 
introduction in the lobby of a theatre or the 
garden of a villa, was an indispensable part of 
their sight-seeing. Such people as these were 
the guests of the Palazzo Muti ; and, together 
with a few Jacobite hangers-on, constituted the 
fluctuating little Court of Louise, Queen of 
Great Britain, France and Ireland, whom the 
people of Rome, hearing of the throne and dai's 
in the ante-room and of the royal ceremonial in 
the palace near the Santissimi Apostoli, usually 
spoke of as the Regina Apostoloruin ; while 
only a very few, who had approached that 
charming little blonde lady, corrected that title 



54 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

to that of Queen of Hearts, Regina dei Cuori. 
Among the few who bowed before Charles 
Edward's wife, in consideration of this last- 
named kingdom, was a brilliant, wayward young 
man, destined to remain a sort of brilliant, way- 
ward, impracticable child until he was eighty ; 
and destined, also, to cherish throughout the 
long hves of both, the sort of half genuine, 
half affected boy's, or rather page's, passion 
with which Queen Louise had inspired him. 
Karl Victor von Bonstetten, of a patrician fam- 
ily of Bern, a Frenchified German, more French, 
more butterfly-like than any real Frenchman, 
even of the old regime, came to Rome, already 
well known by his romantic friendship with the 
Swiss historian Miiller, and by the ideas which he 
had desultorily and gaily aired on most subjects, 
in the year 1773. In his memoirs he wrote as 
follows of the " Queen of Hearts : " '' She was 
of middle height, fair, with dark-blue eyes, a 
slightly turned-up nose, and a dazzling white 
English complexion. Her expression was gay 
and espiegle, and not without a spice of irony, 
on the whole more French than German. She 
was enough to turn all heads. The Pretender 
was tall, lean, good-natured, talkative. He 
liked to have opportunities of speaking English, 
and was given to talking a great deal about his 
adventures — interesting enough for a visitor, 



REGINA APOSTOLORUM. 55 

but not equally so for his intimates, who had 
probably heard those stories a hundred times 
over. After every sentence almost he would 
ask, in Italian, ' Do you understand ? ' His 
young wife laughed heartily at the story of his 
dressing up in woman's clothes. " A dull, 
garrulous husband, boring people with stories 
of which they were sick ; a childish little wife, 
trying to make the best of things, and laughing 
over the stale old jokes; this is what may be 
called the idylic moment in the wedded life of 
Charles Edward and Louise. What would she 
have felt, that strong, calm lady, growing old far 
off in the Isle of Skye, had she been able to see 
what Bonstetten saw ; had she heard the Count 
and Countess of Albany laughing, the one 
with the laughter of an old sot, the other with 
the laughter of a giddy child, over the adven- 
tures of that heroic Prince Charlie whose mem- 
ory was safe in her heart, as the sheets he 
had slept in were safe in her closet, waiting 
to be her grave-clothes } 

Forty-four years later, when the Queen of 
Hearts was a stout, dowdy old lady, with no 
traces of beauty, and himself a flighty, amiable 
old gossip of seventy, Karl Victor von Bonstet- 
ten wrote to the Countess of Albany from 
Rome : " I never pass through the Apostles' 
square without looking up at that balcony, at 
that house where I saw vou for the first time." 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE HEIR. 

In 1765 Horace Walpole, mentioning the now- 
ascertained fact of the Pretender's abjuration 
of Catholicism, informed his friend Mann that 
a rumor was about that Charles Edward had 
declared his intention of never marrying, in 
order that no more Stuarts should remain to 
embroil England. This magnanimous resolu- 
tion, which was a mere repetition of an answer 
made years ago by the Pretender's father, did 
not hold good against the temptations of the 
Cabinet of Versailles. There is something 
particularly disgusting in the thought that, 
merely because the French Government thought 
it convenient to keep a Stuart in reserve with 
whom, if necessary, to trip up England, the 
once magnanimous Charles Edward consented 
to marry in consideration of a certain pension 
from Versailles ; to make money out of any 
possible or probable son he might have. This, 
however, was the plain state of the case ; and 
Louise of Stolberg had been selected, and 



THE HEIR. 57 

married to a drunkard old enough to be her 
father, merely that this honorable bargain be- 
tween the man outraged in 1748, and the 
Government which had outraged him, might be 
satisfactorily fulfilled. 

The Court of Versailles wasted its money ; 
the officially-negotiated baby was never born. 
Nay, Sir Horace Mann, the English Minister at 
Florence, whose spies watched every movement 
of the Count and Countess of Albany, was able 
to report to his Government, in answer to a 
vague rumor of the coming of an heir, that the 
wife of Charles Edward Stuart had never, at 
any moment, had any reasons for expecting to 
become a mother. And when, in the first years 
of this century, Henry Benedict, Cardinal York, 
the younger brother of Charles Edward, was 
buried where the two melancholy genii of 
Canova kept watch in St. Peter's, opposite to 
the portrait of Maria Clementina Sobieski in 
powder and paint and patches, a certain solemn 
feeling came over most Englishmen with the 
thought that the race of James H. was now 
extinct. 

But the world had forgotten that the children 
of Edward IV. were resuscitated ; that the son 
of Louis XVI., whose poor little dead body had 
been handled by the Commissary of the Re- 
public, had returned to earth in the shape of 



58 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

five or six perfectly distinct individuals, Bruneau, 
Hervagault, Naundorff, whatever else their 
names ; that King Arthur is still living in the 
kingdom of Morgan le Fay ; and Barbarossa 
still asleep on the stone table, waiting till the 
rooks which circle around the Kiefhauser hill 
shall tell him to arise ; and the world had, 
therefore, to learn that a Stuart still existed. 
The legend runs as follows : 

In 1773 a certain Dr. Beaton, a staunch Jacob- 
ite, who had fought at Culloden, was attracted, 
while travelling in Italy, by the knowledge that 
his legitimate sovereigns were spending part of 
the summer at a villa in the neighborhood, to 
a vague place somewhere in the Apennines 
between Parma and Lucca, distinguished by the 
extremely un-Tuscan name of St. Rosalie. 
Here, while walking about *'in the deep quiet 
shades," the doctor was one day startled by a 
"calash and four, with scarlet liveries," which 
dashed past him and up an avenue. During 
the one moment of its rapid passage, the 
Scotch physician recognized in the rather 
apocalyptic gentleman wearing the garter and 
the cross of St. Andrew, who sat by the side of 
a beautiful young woman, ** the Bonnie Prince 
Charlie of our faithful beau ideal, still the same 
eagle-featured, royal bird which I had seen on 
his own mountains, when he spread his wings 



THE HEIR. 59 

towards the south." Towards dusk of that 
same day, as Dr. Beaton was pacing up and 
down the convent church of St. Rosalie, doubt- 
less thinking over that " eagle-featured, royal 
bird," whom he had seen driving in the calash 
and four, he was startled in his meditations by 
the jingle of spurs on the pavement, and by 
the approach of a man '' of superior appearance." 

This person was dressed in a manner which 
was '*a little equivocal," wore a broad hat and 
a thick moustache, which, joined with the stern- 
ness of his pale cheek and the piercingness of 
his eye, must indeed have suggested something 
extremely eerie to a well-shaven, three-corner- 
hat, respectable man of the eighteenth century ; 
so that we are not at all surprised to hear that 
the doctor's imagination was crossed by *'a sud- 
den idea of the celebrated Torrifino," who, al- 
though his name sounds like a sweetmeat, was 
probably one of the many mysterious Italians, 
brothers of the Count of Udolpho and Spalatro 
and Zeluco, who haunted the readers of the ro- 
mances of the latter eighteenth century. This 
personage inquired whether he was addressing 
" il Dottor Betoni Scozzere." 

The physician having answered this question, 
asked, for no conceivable reason, in bad Italian 
of a Scotchman by a Scotchman (for we learn 
that the unknown was a Chevalier Graham), the 



60 COiTNTESS OF ALBANY. 

mysterious moustached man requested him to 
attend at once upon " one who stood in immedi- 
ate need." Dr. Beaton's inquiries as to the na- 
ture of the assistance and the person who re- 
quired it having been answered with the solemn 
remark that " the relief of the malady, and not 
the circumstances of the patient, is the province 
of the physician," and the proposal being made 
that he should go to the sick person blindfolded 
and in a shuttered carriage, the doctor's pru- 
dence and the thought of the famous Torrifino 
dictated a flat refusal; but the mysterious 
stranger would not let him off. " Signor," he 
exclaimed (persistently talking bad Italian), '' I 
respect your doubts ; by one word I could dispel 
them ; but it is a secret which would be embar- 
rassing to the possessor. It concerns the inter- 
est and safety of one — the most illustrious and 
unfortunate of the Scottish Jacobites." " What ! 
Whom .? " exclaimed Dr. Beaton. " I can say 
no more," replied the stranger ; " but if you 
would venture any service for one who was once 
the dearest to your country and your cause, fol- 
low me." *'Let us go," cried Dr. Beaton, the 
enthusiasm for Prince Charlie entirely getting 
the better of the thought of the famous Torri- 
fino ; and so, blindfolded, he was conveyed, 
partly by land and partly by water (what water, 
in those Apennine valleys where there are no 



THE HEIR. 6 1 

streams save torrents in which even a punt 
would be impossible, it is difficult to understand), 
to a house standing in a garden. That it did 
stand in a garden appears to have been a piece 
of information volunteered by the mysterious 
Chevalier Graham, for Dr. Beaton expressly 
states that it was not till the two had passed 
through " a long range of apartments " that the 
bandage was removed from his eyes. 

The doctor found himself in a " splendid 
saloon, hung with crimson velvet, and blazing 
with mirrors which reached from the ceiling to 
the floor. At the farther end a pair of folding 
doors stood open, and showed the dim perspec- 
tive of a long conservatory. " The mysterious 
Chevalier Graham rang a silver bell, which 
summoned a little page dressed in scarlet, with 
whom he exchanged a few rapid words in 
German. The communication appeared to agi- 
tate the Chevalier ; and after dismissing the 
page, he turned to the doctor. "Signor Dot- 
tore, " he said, "the most important part of 
your occasion is past. The lady whom you 
have been unhappily called to attend met with 
an alarming accident in her carriage, not half 
an hour before I found you in the church, and 
the unlucky absence of her physician leaves 
her entirely under your charge. Her accouche- 
ment IS over, apparently without any result 



62 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

more than exhaustion ; but of that you will be 
the judge." 

It was only at the mention of the carriage 
accident that Dr. Beaton, whose wits appear to 
be wool-gathering, suddenly guessed at a possi- 
ble connection between these " most illustrious 
and unfortunate of Scottish Jacobites," to 
whose house he had been thus mysteriously 
introduced, and the lady and gentleman in 
whom he had that same afternoon recog- 
nized Charles Edward and his wdfe. The page 
reappeared and conducted Dr. Beaton through 
another suite of splendid apartments, till they 
came to an ante-room decorated with the por- 
traits of no less remarkable persons than the 
rebel Duke of Perth and King James VIII. — 
a fact which shows that the Stuarts must have 
carried their furniture with them, from Rome 
to a Lucchese villa hired for a few months, 
with more recklessness than one might have 
imagined likely in those days of post-chaises. 
Out of this ante-room the physician was ush- 
ered into a large and magnificent bed-room, lit 
with a single taper. From the side of a crim- 
son-draped bed stepped a lady, who saluted Dr. 
Beaton in English, and led him up to the 
patient, while a female attendant nursed an 
infant enveloped in a mantle. The lady drew 
aside the curtain, and by the faint light the 



THE HEIR. 63 

doctor was able to distinguish a pale, delicate 
face, and a slender white arm and hand lying 
upon the blue velvet counterpane. The lady 
in waiting said some words in German, in 
answer to which the sick woman feebly 
attempted to stretch out her hand to the phy- 
sician. Having ascertained that the patient 
was in a dangerous condition, Dr. Beaton asked 
for pen and paper to write out a prescription, 
which, in that Apennine wilderness, would 
doubtless be made up with the greatest exact- 
ness and rapidity. By the side of the writing- 
desk was a dressing-table ; and on what should 
the doctor's casual glance not rest but a minia- 
ture, thrown carelessly among the scent bottles 
and jewels, and in which he instantly recog- 
nized a portrait of Charles Edward such as he 
had seen him riding on the field of Culloden ! But 
in a moment, when he glanced again from his 
writing to the toilet-table, the miniature was 
no longer visible. 

The lady having apparently recovered. Dr. 
Beaton was dismissed, blindfolded as he had 
come, but only after having taken an oath upon 
the crucifix "never to speak of what he had 
heard, or seen, or thought, that night, except it 
should be in the service of King Charles," and 
also to quit Tuscany immediately. He repaired, 
therefore, to the nearest seaport, but was de- 



64 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

tained there three days before the departure of 
the ship. One moonlight evening, as he was 
walking on the sands, he was surprised by seeing 
an English man-of-war at anchor. In answer to 
his inquiries she proved to be the Albma^ Com- 
modore O'Haloran. While he was lying in a 
sequestered corner, watching the frigate, he was 
startled by the sudden appearance of a small 
closed carriage and of a horseman, in whom, by 
the moonlight, he immediately recognized the 
moustached stranger of St. Rosalie. The cav- 
alcade stopped at the water's brink and the 
horseman blew a shrill whistle. Immediately a 
man-of-war's boat shot from behind some rocks 
and pulled straight towards them. A man with 
glimmering epaulettes sprang from the boat to 
the beach, and helped into it a lady, who had 
alighted from the carriage, and carried some- 
thing wrapped in a shawl. Dr. Beaton heard 
the cry of an infant, the soothing voice of the 
lady ; and a moment later, after a word and 
shake of the hand with the moustached man, 
the boat pulled off from shore. " For more 
than a quarter of an hour the tall black figure 
of the cavalier continued fixed upon the same 
spot and in the same attitude ; but soon the 
broad gigantic shadow of the frigate swung 
round in the moonshine, her sails filled to the 
breeze, and dimly brightening in the light, she 



THE HEIR. 65 

bore off slow and still and stately towards the 
west." 

Such is the adventure of Dr. Beaton, and thus 
he is said to have related it, in the year 1831, 
eighty-five years after the battle of Culloden, 
where he had himself seen Charles Edward ; 
whence it is presumable that the doctor was 
considerably over a hundred when he made the 
disclosure. The story of Doctor Beaton was 
published, not in a historical work, but in a vol- 
ume entitled Tales of the Century ; or. Sketches of 
the Romance of History between the Years 1 746 
a7id I'^A^d, pubUshed at Edinburgh in 1847. ^^t 
although this book might pass as a work of im- 
agination, and could, therefore, scarcely be im- 
pugned as a historical document, there is every 
reason for supposing that, while not officially 
claiming to reveal the existence of an heir of 
the Stuarts, it was deliberately intended to con- 
vey information to that effect ; and as such, an 
anonymous writer (either Lockhart or Dennis- 
toun) made short work of it in the Quarterly 
Review for June, 1847, from which I have de- 
rived the greater part of my knowledge of this 
curious *' romance of history." 

Nay, the Tales of the Century were undoubt- 
edly intended to insinuate a further remarkable 
fact ; not merely that there still existed heirs of 
Stuarts in the direct male line, but that these 
3 



66 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

heirs of the Stuarts were no others but the joint 
authors of the book. The two brothers styHng 
themselves on the title-page John Sobieski 
Stuart and Charles Edward Stuart, but whose 
legal names were respectively John Hay Allan 
and Charles Stuart Allan, had been known for 
some years in the Highlands as persons envel- 
oped in. a degree of romantic mystery, and claim- 
ing to be something much more illustrious than 
what they were officially supposed to be, the 
grandsons of an admiral in the service of George 
HI. According to the information collected b)'' 
Baron von Reumont, the joint authors of the 
Tales of the Ceiitiijy \\2id made themselves con- 
spicuous by their affectation of the Stuart tar- 
tan, to which, as Hay Allans, they could have 
no right ; by a certain Stuart make-up (by the 
help of a Charles I. wig which was once found 
and mistaken for a bird's nest by an irreverent 
Highlander), on the part of the elder, and by a 
habit of bowing to his brother whenever the 
King's health was drank, on the part of the 
younger. 

Moreover, the family circumstances of these 
gentlemen's father coincided exactly with those 
of the hero of this book, of the supposed 
son of Charles Edward Stuart and Louise 
of Stolberg. Their father, Thomas Hay Allan, 
once a lieutenant in the navy, was known before 



THE HEIR. 67 

the law as the younger son of a certain Admiral 
Carter Allan, who laid claims to the earldom 
of Errol ; and the Jolair Dhearg (for such was 
the Keltic appellation of the hero of the 
Tales of the CeiiUiry) was the reputed son of a 
certain Admiral O'Haloran, who laid claim to 
the earldom of Strathgowrie, to which curious 
parallel the writer in the Quarterly adds the 
additional point that Errol being in the district 
of Gowrie, the earldom of Strathgowrie claimed 
by the imaginary Admiral O'Haloran was evi- 
dently another name for the earldom of Errol 
claimed by the real Admiral Carter Allan — 
two names, by the way, O'Haloran and Carter 
Allan, of which the first seems intended to 
reproduce in some measure the sound of the 
other. The father of Messrs. John Hay and 
Charles Stuart Allan was married in 1792, and 
the hero of the Tales of the Century was mar- 
ried somewhere about 1791, both to ladies 
more suited to the sons of an admiral than to 
the sons of the Pretender. Taking all these 
circumstances into consideration, it becomes 
obvious that when the two brothers Hay 
Allan assumed respectively the names of 
John Sobieski and Charles Edward Stuart, they 
distinctly, though unofficially, identified them- 
selves with the sons of Jolair Dhearg of their 
book, with the sons of that mysterious infant 



6S COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

at whose birth Dr. Beaton had been present, 
who had been conveyed by night on board 
the Albina and educated as the son of Admiral 
O'Haloran ; in other words, with the sons of the 
child, unknown to history, of the Count and 
Countess of Albany. 

Now, not only are we assured by Sir Horace 
Mann, whose spies surrounded the Pretender 
and his wife, and included even their physi- 
cians, that there never was the smallest 
or briefest expectation of an heir to the 
Stuarts ; but, added to this positive evidence, 
we have an enormous bulk of even more con- 
vincing negative evidence by which it is com- 
pletely corroborated. This negative evidence 
consists of a heap of improbabilities and 
impossibilities, of which even a few will serve 
to convince the reader. The Pretender mar- 
ried, and was pensioned for marrying, merely 
that the French Court might have another 
possible Pretender to use as a weapon against 
England : is it likely, therefore, that such an 
heir would be hid away so as to lose his iden- 
tity, and be completely and utterly forgotten } 
The Pretender, separated from his wife in con- 
sequence of circumstances which will be related 
further on, called to him, as sole companion for 
his old age, his illegitimate daughter by Miss 
Walkenshaw, after neglecting and apparently 



THE HEIR. 69 

forgetting both her and her mother for twenty 
years : is it Hkely he would have done this had 
he possessed a legitimate son ? Cardinal York 
assumed the title of Henry IX. immediately 
on the decease of his brother : is it likely that 
he, always indifferent to royal honors, always 
faithful to his brother, and now almost dying, 
would have done so had he known that his 
brother had left a son ? The Countess of 
Albany, who never relinquished her Stuart 
position, and who was extremely devoted to 
children, left her fortune to the painter Fabre : 
is it likely she would have done so had she been 
aware that she possessed a child of her own? 
But there is yet further evidence — I scarcely 
know whether I should say positive or nega- 
tive, but in point of fact perhaps both at once, 
since it is evident that the word of one, at 
least, of the joint authors of the Tales of the 
Century cannot outweigh the silence of all 
other authorities. Five years before the 
brothers Allan, or Stuart, whichever they 
should be called, mysteriously informed the 
world of the adventures of the Jolair Dhearg, 
the elder of the two, once John Hay Allan, 
now John Sobieski Stuart, had brought out a 
magnificent volume, price five guineas, entitled 
Vestiarium Scoticitm, and purporting to be a 
treatise on family tartans written somewhere 



70 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

in the sixteenth century, and now edited for 
the first time. The history of this work, as 
stated in the preface, was well-nigh as compli- 
cated and as romantic as the history of the 
Jolair Dhearg. The only reliable copy of 
three known by Mr. Sobieski Stuart, of which 
one was said to exist in the library of the Mon- 
astery of St. Augustine at Cadiz, and another 
had been obtained from an Edinburgh sword- 
player and porter named John Ross, was in the 
possession of the learned editors, and had 
been given by the fathers of the Scots College 
at Douay to Prince Edward Stuart, from whom 
it had, in some unspecified but doubtless 
extremely romantic manner (probably sown in 
the swaddling clothes in which the Jolair 
Dhearg was consigned to Admiral O'Haloran), 
descended to Mr. John Sobieski Stuart. This 
venerable heraldic document appears, if one 
might judge by the review in the Qttarterly, to 
have been well deserving of publication, owing 
to the extremely new and unexpected informa- 
tion which it contained upon Scottish archaeol- 
ogy. Among such information may be men- 
tioned that it derived several clans from other 
clans with which they were well known to have 
no possible connection ; that it extended the 
use of tartans to border families who had never 
heard of such a thing ; that it contained many 



THE HEIR. 71 

words and expressions hitherto entirely 
unknown in the particular dialect in which it 
was written ; and moreover, that it multiplied 
complicated and recondite patterns of tartans 
in a manner so remarkable that Sir Walter 
Scott, to whom part of Mr. Sobieski Stuart's 
transcript of the ancient manuscript was sub- 
mitted, was led to suspect ''that information 
as to its origin might be obtained even in a less 
romantic site than the cabin of a Cowgate por- 
ter (or the Scots College at Douay), even behind 
the counter of one of the great clan-tartan 
warehouses which used to illuminate the prin- 
cipal thoroughfare of Edinburgh. 

This important and well-nigh unique doc- 
ument was apparently never submitted in its 
original manuscript to any one ; the copy from 
the Scots College at Douay, and the copy from 
the old sword-player of Cowgate, remained 
equally unknown to every one save their fort- 
unate possessor. But transcripts of some por- 
tions of the work were submitted, at the 
request of the Antiquarian Society, to Sir 
Walter Scott, and as he dismissed the deputa- 
tion which had met to hear his opinion upon 
the Vestiarium Scoticum^ the author of Waver- 
ley was pleased to remark by way of summing 
up: ''Well, I think the March of the next 
rising" (alluding to the part of the Highlanders 



72 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

in the '45) "■ must be not * Hey tuttie tattie,' 
but 'The Devil among the Tailors.' " 

However, perhaps the Vestiaritim Scoticiini 
may have come out of the Scots College at 
Douay, and perhaps also the son of Charles 
Edward Stuart and of Louise of Stolberg may 
have been born in the room hung with red 
brocade, and have been handed over to a British 
admiral one moonlight night, in the presence of 
the venerable Dr. Beaton, whom Providence 
permitted to attain the unusual age of a hundred 
years or more, in order that, with unimpaired 
faculties and unclouded memory, he might 
transmit to posterity this strange romance of 
history. 



CHAPTER V. 



FLORENCE. 



It is quite impossible to tell the precise mo- 
ment at which began what Horace Mann, most 
light-hearted and chirpy of diplomatists, called 
the Countess of Albany's martyrdom. As we 
have seen, Charles Edward had momentarily 
given up all excessive drinking at the time of 
his marriage. Bonstetten thought him a good- 
natured, garrulous bore, and his wife a merry, 
childish young woman, who laughed at her 
husband's oft-told stories. This was the very 
decent exterior of the Pretender's domestic life 
in the first year of his marriage. But who can 
tell what there may have been before beneath 
the surface ^ Who can say when Louise d'Al- 
bany, hitherto apparently so childish, became 
suddenly a woman with the first terrible sus- 
picion of the nature of the bondage into which 
she had been sold } Such things are unromantic, 
unpoetical, coarse, commonplace ; yet if the 
fears and the despair of a guiltless and charm- 
ing girl have any interest for us, the first whiff 



74 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

of brandy-tainted breath which met the young 
wife in her husband's embraces, the first qualms 
and reekings after dinner which came be- 
fore her eyes, the first bestial and unquiet 
drunkard's sleep which kept her awake in 
disgust and terror, these things, vile though 
they be, are as tragic as any more ideal horrors. 
At the beginning, most probably, Charles 
Edward drank only in the evening, and slept 
off his drunkenness overnight ; nor does Bon- 
stetten appear to have guessed that there was 
any skeleton in the palace at the Santissimi 
Apostoli. But the spies of the English Min- 
ister soon reported that Charles Edward' was 
returning to his old ways; that the *' nasty 
bottle," as Cardinal York called it, had got the 
better of the young wife ; and when, two years 
after their marriage, the Count and Countess 
of Albany had left Rome and settled in Flor- 
ence, Charles Edward seems very soon to have 
acquired in the latter place the dreadful notori- 
ety which he had long enjoyed in the former. 

Circumstances also had conduced to replunge 
the Pretender into the habits to which the re- 
newed hope of political support, the novelty of 
married life, and perhaps whatever of good may 
still have been conjured up in his nature by the 
presence of a beautiful young wife, had mo- 
mentarily broken through. The French Gov- 



FLORENCE. 75 

ernment, after its sudden pre-occupation about 
the future of the Stuarts, seemed to have com- 
pletely forgotten the existence of Charles Ed- 
ward, except as regarded the payment of the 
pension granted on his marriage. The child 
that had been prepaid by that wedding pension, 
who was to rally the Jacobites round a man 
whose claims must otherwise devolve legiti- 
mately in a few years to the Hanoverian usurp- 
ers, the heir, was not born, and, as month went 
by after month, its final coming became less and 
less likely. Nor was this all. Charles Edward 
seems to have expected that the sudden interest 
taken by the Court of Versailles in his affairs, 
and his new position as a married man and the 
possible father of a line of Stuarts, would bring 
the obdurate sovereigns of Italy, and especially 
the Pope, to grant him those royal honors en- 
joyed by his father, but hitherto obstinately 
denied to the moody drunkard whose presence 
in the paternal palace had been occasionally re- 
vealed only by the rumor of some more than or- 
dinarily gross debauch, or the noise of some 
more than ordinarily violent scene of black- 
guardly altercation. 

Charles Edward, as I have already had occa- 
sion to remark, while absolutely callous to the 
rights which self-sacrifice and heroism might 
give others over him, was extremely alive to the 



^(i COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

rights which, as a Stuart and as an obstinate 
and wilful man, he imagined himself to possess 
over other folk ; and while it never occurred to 
him that there might be something slightly 
ungentlemanly in a prince who had secretly ab- 
jured the Catholic faith for political reasons 
continuing to live in a house and on a pension 
granted him by the unsuspecting sovereign 
Pontiff in consideration of his being a martyr 
for the glory of the Church, he was fully per- 
suaded of the cowardly meanness which pre- 
vented Clement XIV., whose interest it was to 
jog on amicably with England, from acknowl- 
edging the grandson of James II. as a legitimate 
king of Great Britain and Ireland. It is there- 
fore easy to conceive the accumulation of disap- 
pointment and anger with which Charles Ed- 
ward saw his hopes deluded. He had, immedi- 
ately on his return to Rome, officially announced 
to Clement XIV. the arrival in the Eternal City 
of King Charles III. and his Queen, and the 
Pope had condescended no answer save that he 
had hitherto been unaware of the existence of 
such persons, and that he would suffer none such 
to live under his jurisdiction. He had for more 
than a year imposed upon his wife (despite Car- 
dinal York's and her own entreaties, if we may 
credit Sir Horace Mann) the title and etiquette 
of a queen, and had flaunted his scarlet liveries 



FLORENCE. 7/ 

along the Corso day after day, with no result 
save that of making the Roman nobles keep 
carefully out of the way whereVer he and his 
wife might go ; nay, more, he had replaced over 
the doorway of his residence the royal escut- 
cheon of Great Britain, only to return from the 
country one day and find that the Pontifical 
police had taken it down during his absence. 
After this we can understand, as I said, the dis- 
appointment and rage which must have accumu- 
lated in his heart, and which, fifteen months after 
his wedding, made him abandon the base town of 
the popes and seek sympathy and dignity in the 
capital of Tuscany. But he was destined only to 
further disappointment. The Grand Duke, Peter 
Leopold, the practical, economical, priest-hating, 
paternally-meddlesome, bustling and tyrannical- 
ly-reforming son of Maria Theresa, was not the 
man to console so mediaeval and antiquated and 
unphilosophical a thing as a Stuart. The arri- 
val, the presence of Charles Edward in Florence, 
was absolutely ignored by the Court, and no in- 
vitations of any sort were sent out either to 
King Charles III. or to the Count of Albany. 
Except the Corsinis, old friends of the Stuarts, 
who had known Charles Edward in his brilliant 
boyhood, and who politely placed at his disposal 
their half-suburban palace or casino, opening on 
to the famous Oricellari Gardens, no one seemed 



78 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

inclined to pay any particular respects to the 
new-comers. There was, indeed, no pressure 
from the Government (as had been the case in 
Rome), and the Florentine nobles, whose exclu- 
siveness and pride had been considerably dimin- 
ished by the inroad of swaggering Lorenese 
favorites under the Grand Duke Francis, and of 
cut-and-dry Austrian officials under his son 
Peter Leopold, showed a sort of lukewarm wil- 
lingness to receive the Count and Countess of 
Albany on equal terms into their society. But 
Charles Edward wanted royal honors ; he for- 
bade his wife demeaning her queenly position 
by returning the visits of Florentine ladies, and 
the nobles of the Tuscan court gradually left the 
would-be King and Queen of England to their 
own resources. 

These resources, with the exception of receiv- 
ing such few visitors as might care to know 
them on unequal terms, and a dogged pushing 
into notice in every place, promenade, theatre, 
or nobles' club, where no invitation was required, 
these resources consisted on the part of Charles 
Edward in the old, old consoler, the flask of Cy- 
prus or bottle of brandy, in the even grosser 
pleasures of excessive eating, the indefatigable, 
assiduous courtship of his young wife, and the 
occasional rows with his servants and acquaint- 
ances. The Count and Countess of Albany 



FLORENCE. 79 

appear to have inhabited the Casino Corsini 
until 1777, when they sent for the greater part 
of the furniture of their Roman house, and es- 
tablished themselves in a palace, bought of the 
Guadagnis and later sold to the Duke of San 
Clemente, between the now suppressed Porta 
San Sebastiano and the Garden of St. Mark's. 
In both these places Sir Horace Mann, tke vig- 
ilant Minister to the Tuscan Court and head 
spy over the Stuarts in Italy, kept the Pretender 
well in sight ; but, in fact, things had now be- 
come so public that spying had grown unneces- 
sary. 

Already, the year following the removal from 
Rome to Florence, Sir Horace Mann wrote to 
Walpole that the Pretender's health was giving 
way beneath his excesses of eating and drink- 
ing ; dyspepsia and dropsy were beginning, 
and a sofa had been ordered for his opera-box, 
that he might conveniently snooze through the 
performance, — for neither drunkenness nor 
ailments would induce Charles Edward to let 
his wife out of his sight for a minute. His 
systematic jealousy may possibly have origina- 
ted, as the English Minister reports Charles 
Edward to have himself declared, from fear 
lest there might attach to the birth of any 
possible heir of his those doubts of legitimacy 
which are almost invariably the lot of a pre- 



80 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

tender; but there can be no doubt that jea-tousy 
was an essential feature of his character, in 
which it amounted almost to a monomania. He 
had caged his mistress long after he had ceased, 
by his own avowal, to care for her ; he now 
caged his wife, and with probably about as 
much or as little affection. He had fenced up 
Miss Walkenshaw's bed with tables and chairs 
fitted with bells which the slightest touch set 
ringing; he now (and so early as 1775) barri- 
caded all avenues to his wife's room excepting 
the one through his own. Very soon, also, the 
gross and violent language, the blows which 
had fallen to the lot of the half-tipsy mistress, 
were to be shared by the virtuous and patient 
wife. 

For virtuous and patient all accounts unite in 
showing the young Countess of Albany to have 
been. In that corrupt Florence of the corrupt 
eighteenth century, where every married woman 
was furnished, within two years of her marriage, 
with an officially appointed lover who sat in 
her dressing-room while she was finishing her 
toilet, who accompanied her on all her visits, 
who attended her to balls and theatres, and, in 
fact, entirely replaced, by the strict social 
necessities of the system of cicisbeism, the 
husband, who was similarly employed about the 
wife of another; in this society where conjugal 



FLORENCE. 8 1 

infidelity was a social organization supplemented 
by every kind of individual caprice of gallantry ; 
where women were none the worse thought of 
if they added to the official cavaliere servante a 
whole string of other lovers, varying from the 
cardinals of the Holy Church to the singers 
who played women's parts, in powder and 
hoops, at the opera; in this world of jog-trot 
immorality, where jealousy was tolerated in 
lovers, but ridiculous in husbands, such a couple 
as the Count and Countess of Albany was 
indeed a source of pity, wonder and amazement. 
But if a husband who barricaded his wife's 
room never went out without her, nor permitted 
her to go out without him, who was never 
further off than the next room during the pres- 
ence of any visitor, was a marvellous sight, 
still more marvellous was a beautiful and 
charming woman of twenty-three or twenty- 
four, who cast no glances of longing at the 
brilliant cavaliers all round her, who consoled 
her dreary prison-hours with reading hard 
enough for a professor at the university, and 
who showed towards the peevish, violent, dis- 
gustingly-ailing old toper who overshadowed 
her life with his presence, nothing, as Horace 
Mann tells us, but -attention and tenderness. 
The fact is that Louise of Stolberg, much as 
her subsequent life and ways of thought proved 



82 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

her to be a woman of the eighteenth century, 
and not at all above the eighteenth century's 
easy-going habits and conventional ideas, was a 
kind of woman rare at all times and rarest of 
all in a time like her own. With a kindly and 
affectionate temper, the immense bulk of her 
nature, the overbalance, the top-heaviness of it, 
was intellectual ; and intellectual not in the 
sense of the ready society intelligence, so com- 
mon among eighteenth-century women, but in 
the sense of actual engrossing interest and in 
abstract questions and ideals. The portraits 
done of her immediately after her marriage 
show, as I have said, a remarkably childish per- 
son ; and childish, without much ballast of 
■passion or even likings, the likeness sketched 
by Bonstetten seems certainly to show her. 
But there are women who, while immature as 
women and human beings, are precocijous as 
intellects, and in whom the character, instead 
of rapidly developing itself by the force of its 
own emotions and passions, seems in a manner 
to be called into existence by the intelligence ; 
retarded natures, in whom the thoughts seem 
to determine the feelings. Of this sort, I 
think, we must imagine the Countess of Albany, 
if we would understand the anomalies of her 
life ; a person rather deficient in sensitiveness ; 
indifferent, light-hearted, in her girlhood; not 



FLORENCE. 83 

rebelling against the frightful negativeness of 
existence, the want of love, of youth, of bright- 
ness, of all that a young girl can want in the 
early part of her married life ; not rebelling 
against the positive miseries, the constant pres- 
ence of everything that was mentally and 
physically loathsome in the second period of 
this wedded slavery : a woman of cold tempera- 
ment, and even, you might say, of cold heart, 
and safe, safe in the routine of duty and suffer- 
ing, until a merely intellectual flame burst out, 
white and cold, in her hitherto callous nature. 
A creature, so to speak, only half awake, or 
awake, perhaps, only when she devoured her 
books and tried to puzzle out her mathematical 
problems ; and going through life by the side 
of her jealous, brutal, sickly, drunken husband, 
in a kind of somnambulistic indifferentism, per- 
haps not feeling her miseries very acutely, and 
probably not envying other women their mean- 
ingless liberty, their inane lovers, their empty 
wholeness of life. 

Thus the routine continued. The Count and 
Countess of Albany, cured by this time of any 
affectation of royalty, had gradually got domes- 
ticated in Florentine society. People began to 
go to their house, the newly-bought palace in 
Via San Sebastiano. People came to the opera- 
box where Charles Edward lay stretched, doz- 



84 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

ing or snoring, his bottle of Cyprus wine by 
his side, on his sofa. It is easy to read, through 
the Hnes of Sir Horace Mann's pages of social tit- 
tle-tattle, that Florence, frivolous and unintellec- 
tual and corrupt though it was, and, perhaps, 
almost in proportion to its friyolity, emptiness 
and corruption, felt a strange sort of interest, 
experienced a vague, mixed feeling, pity, fear, 
and general surprise and want of comprehension 
towards this beautiful young woman, with her 
dazzling white complexion, dark, hazel eyes and 
blonde hair, her childish features grown, per- 
haps not less young, but more serious and sol- 
emn for her five years of wasted youth and 
endured misery, with her reputation for cold- 
ness, her almost legendary eccentricities of 
intellectual interests. Women like this one 
are apt to be regarded not so much with dislike 
and envy, as with the mixed awe and pity 
which peasants feel towards an idiot, by frivo- 
lous and immoral people like those powdered 
Florentines of a hundred years ago, whose bro- 
caded trains and embroidered coats have long 
since found their way into the cupboards of 
curiosity shops, and been cut up into quaint 
room decoration by aesthetically-minded for- 
eigners ; pity and awe the more natural when, 
as in the case of Louise d' Albany, it is evi- 
dent to every man and woman, l^iowever heart- 



FLORENCE. 85 

less and stupid, that the creature in question 
is a victim, and an innocent one. People 
were led, perhaps to some extent by imperti- 
nent curiosity, by the lazy desire to have some 
opinion to give upon that now legendary house- 
hold of the besotten, sleepy, nauseous old King 
of England and his terribly virtuous and 
intellectual young Queen, to the palace in Via 
San Sebastiano ; and men and women of fashion 
led thither, as to one of the curious sights of 
Florence, their country cousins and their dis- 
tinguished visitors from other parts. And 
thus, one day in the autumn of i j'jjy there was 
brought, we know not by whom, half-curious 
and half -indifferent, to the salon of the Countess 
of Albany, a certain very tall, thin, pale young 
man of twenty-eight, with handsome, mobile, 
rather hard aquiline features, choleric, flashing 
blue eyes, and a head of crisp, bright red hair ; 
a man of fashion, nattily dressed in the Sardin- 
ian uniform, but with something strange, 
untamed, morose about his whole aspect which 
contrasted singularly with the effete graceful- 
ness and amiability of young Florentine dan- 
dies. He had heard of the Countess of 
Albany's eccentricities long before ; she had 
doubtless heard of his. 

One can imagine the curiosity with which 
the wild, moody young officer fixed those 



S6 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

bright, hard, steel, flashing blue eyes upon the 
beautiful young woman of whom he had heard 
that she was what no woman of his acquaintance 
(and his acquaintance was but too large) had 
been — intellectual and virtuous. One can 
imagine the curiosity, much vaguer and more 
indifferent, with which the woefully cold and 
woefully weary young woman met the scrutiny 
of those hard, flashing blue eyes, and took the 
moral measure of this eccentric creature, come 
from Turin to Florence with some ten or 
twelve half-tamed horses, in order to learn 
Tuscan grammar for the sake of writing trage- 
dies. The common friend, whose name has 
been engulfed into the unknowable, introduced 
to the Countess of Albany Count Vittorio 
Alfieri. 



CHAPTER VI. 



ALFIERI. 



The childhood and early youth of Vittorio 
Alfieri had been strangely vacant, dreary, one 
might almost say intellectually and morally 
sordid : and the strangest, the dreariest cir- 
cumstance about them was exactly that this 
vacuity, this dreariness, this total want of all 
that can make the life of a boy and of a young 
man pleasant to our fancy or attractive to our 
sympathy, did not in the least depend upon any 
harshness or stinginess of fate. Indeed, per- 
haps no man had ever prepared for him an eas- 
ier existence ; no man had ever less misfortune 
sent to him by Providence, or less unkindness 
shown towards him by mankind, than this con- 
stantly struggling, this pessimistic and misan- 
thropic man. The only son of Count Alfieri of 
Cortemiglia, of one of the richest and noblest fam- 
ilies of Asti in Piedmont, his early childhood was 
spent under the care of his mother, a woman 
of almost saintly simplicity and kindness, 
unworldly, charitable, devoted to her children 



88 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

and to the poor of the place ; and of her third 
husband, also an Alfieri, who appears to have 
been, in his affection and generosity towards 
his wife's children, everything that a step- 
father is usually supposed not to be. Being 
delicate in health, the boy was treated with 
every degree of consideration, never worried 
with lessons, never exasperated with punish- 
ments, as long as he remained at home. He 
was sent, under the care of an uncle, the emi- 
nent architect, Benedetto Alfieri, who appears 
to have been the ideally amiable uncle as Gia- 
cinto Alfieri appears to have been the ideally 
amiable step-father, to the academy or nobles' 
college at Turin, where again, provided with 
plenty of money, and a most accommodating 
half-tutor, half-valet, he enjoyed, or might 
have enjoyed, every advantage possible to a 
young Piedmontese noble, either in the way of 
study or of idleness. And, finally, when still in 
his teens, he had been supplied with ample 
money, horses and fine clothes ad libitum^ and 
almost unlimited liberty to wander all over the 
world from Naples to Holland, from St. Peters- 
burg to Cadiz, in search of experience or amuse- 
ment. Nor during those years of youthful 
wanderings does he ever seem, except on one 
memorable occasion, to have been made to suf- 
fer from the unconscientiousness, the harsh- 



ALFIERI. 89 

ness, the infidelity, the indifference of the men 
and women whom he met, any more than in 
his boyhood he had suffered from the severity 
of his masters, the brutaHty of his tutor-ser- 
vants, or the ill nature of his fellow pupils. 

Fate and the world were extremely kind to 
Vittorio Alfieri, giving him every advantage 
and comfort, and teaching him no cruel lessons. 
But Vittorio Alfieri was nevertheless one of the 
least happy of little boys, and one of the least 
happy of young men. He was born with an 
uncomfortable and awkward and unwieldy char- 
acter, as some men are born lame, or scrofulous, 
or dyspeptic. The child of a father over sixty, 
and of a very young mother, there was in him 
some indefinable imperfection of nature, some 
jar of character, or some great want, some 
original sin of mental constitution, which made 
him different from other men, disabled him 
from getting pleasure or profit out of the cir- 
cumstances which gave pleasure or profit to 
them ; and turned his youth into a long period 
of mental weakness and suffering, from which 
he recovered, indeed, by a system of moral and 
intellectual cold water, meagre diet and excess- 
ive exercise, but only to remain for the rest of 
his days in a condition of character absolutely 
analogous to the bodily condition of those self- 
martyring invalids who keep the gout down by 



90 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

taking exhausting walks, eating next to no 
dinner, and filling the lives of others with their 
excitable cantankerousness and gloomy fore- 
bodings. There was a numbness and yet a 
sort of over-sensitiveness about his youth ; a 
strangeness which, without giving the least 
promise of superior genius, merely made him 
less happy than other lads. 

The word numbness returns to my mind in 
connection with this young Alfieri ; it certainly 
does not express the exact impressions left in 
me by his own narrative of his boyhood and 
youth, and yet I can find no better word ; there 
was in him something like those irregularities 
of the circulation due to dyspepsia, which, 
while making some part of the body, say the 
head, throb and ache at the least sound, yet 
leave the whole man dull, heavy, only half 
awake. 

As a child he had vague and wistful cravings, 
untempered, unbeautified by such imaginative 
visions as usually accompany the eccentric 
feelings of such children as are subject to them. 
Obstinate and taciturn, he tells us of the curi- 
ous passion which he experienced for the little 
choristers, boys of twelve or thirteen, whom he 
saw serving mass, or heard singing the re- 
sponses, in the Carmine Church at Asti. 
Silently, painfully, he seems to have yearned 



ALFIEIU. 91 

for them in solitude ; the daily visit to the 
church where they shone out in their white 
surplices being the only pleasure in this black, 
blind httle life of seven or eight. Some physi- 
cal ailment, some want of change and movement, 
may have underlain this morbid and sombre 
passionateness ; and we learn that when he was 
still a tiny boy, having heard that the poison- 
ous hemlock was a sort of grass which brought 
death, and with no clear notion what death was, 
but with a vague longing for it, he gorged him- 
self with grass out of the garden, in the belief 
that there would be some hemlock in it. 

At school he learned nothing. The education 
given at the Academy of Turin may, indeed, 
have been poor in quantity and quality ; still 
it was the best which a young Piedmontese 
nobleman could obtain, and Alfieri himself 
confesses that of his school-fellows most came 
away with more profit, and some afterwards be- 
came cultured and even learned men. He 
learned hothing because he felt interest, em- 
ulation, curiosity about nothing. His nature 
was still dull, dumb, dormant ; and what he 
calls a period of vegetation might more fitly be 
termed a moral and intellectual hibernation. 
His school life is a weary, colorless, featureless 
part of his autobiography. He would seem to 
have made neither friends nor enemies. The 



92 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

tricks practised by or upon other school-boys 
are never mentioned by him ; never a practical 
joke, a lark, a scrape. Of his intellectual ten- 
dencies, which were but little developed, we 
learn only that he exchanged a copy of Ariosto, 
finally confiscated by the authorities, for a cer- 
tain number of helpings of chicken, relinquished 
by him to its possessor ; and that he bribed, 
with eatables also, a certain other boy to tell 
him stories. 

The one incident which sheds light upon the 
lad's morbid constitution or condition, which re- 
veals that strange, apathetic obstinacy, that vis 
inerticB which was the spring even of his most 
decided actions in after-life, and which at the 
same time raises grave doubts in my mind 
whether there may not have been an actual 
taint of insanity in this extraordinary being, is 
the incident of his having submitted, rather 
than give in after some misdemeanor, to being 
confined to his room in the academy for nearly 
three months at a stretch. Alfieri was fifteen ; 
he might have been let loose for the asking, 
since there was no real severity in the school. 
He slept nearly all day long, rose in the even- 
ing, but refused to let himself be combed or 
dressed, and lay for hours on a mattress before 
the fire, cooking a squalid meal of polenta in- 
stead of his dinner, which he regularly sent 



ALFIERI. 93 

down ; receiving the visits of his school-fellows 
without speaking or even moving ; deaf and 
dumb, as he describes himself, by the hour to- 
gether, his eyes fixed on the ground, brimful 
with tears, but never permitting himself to cry 
or complain — a strange sort of savage animal 
rather than a human being. 

After leaving school at eighteen he began his 
long series of journeys, his series of passions 
for women and for horses, passions dull and 
dumb, but violent, yet never such as to break 
through the spell of inarticulateness which 
seemed to freeze his nature. Nothing more 
curious can be fancied than his journeys. He 
went from place to place without being attracted 
to any, without feeling the smallest interest in 
anything which he saw, without contracting the 
faintest attachment for any person or thing, 
driven along by a sort of fury of restlessness and 
sombre vacuity. Many youths have doubtless 
been to the full as indifferent as Vittorio Alfieri 
to all the objects of interest on their road ; but 
they have been so from frivolity or giddiness, and 
no one was ever less frivolous or giddy than the 
young Alfieri. With no particular purity of na- 
ture or principles of conduct to restrain him 
from vice, his dissipation could yet scarcely be 
called dissipation; so little did it wake up this 
lethargic, ailing, restless nature. Despite the 



94 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

furious passion which he had for horses, and the 
hysterical, one might almost say epileptic pas- 
sions which he experienced for women, he re- 
mained characterless, chaotic, only half alive. 
His many journeys gave him only the negative 
pleasure of getting away from already known 
places, the negative wisdom of seeing through a 
variety of things, military and diplomatic dis- 
tinctions and national prejudices. He remained 
joyless and ignorant, and, what was worse, with- 
out longing for pleasure or desire for knowledge. 
More than once kindly men of the world and 
scholars were smitten with pity for this strange 
lad, in whom they could not but recognize cer- 
tain negative qualities rare in the eighteenth 
century — an intense and cruel truthfulness, an 
absolute disinterestedness, a constitutional con- 
tempt for all the vanities and baseness of the 
world. They tried to talk to him, to lend him 
books, to awaken him out of this dormouse sleep 
of the intellect, to break the spell which weighed 
him down. All in vain. He continued his life 
of dull dissipation and dull wanderings through 
Italy, Germany, France, England, far into Spam, 
Portugal, Russia, and even Finland. Periodic 
fits of depression and of almost sordid avarice 
showed that he was still the same person as the 
boy of fifteen who had spent those three months 
unwashed, unkempt, in savage squalor, by his 



ALFIERL 95 

fireside ; and fits of brutal and almost maniac 
violence, as when, because a hair was sharply- 
pulled out by the roots during the elaborate 
process of frizzling, he cut open with a blow of 
a heavy silver candlestick the temple of his 
faithful valet Elia, who had nursed him like a 
mother, and whose only revenge, after this fear- 
ful scene, was to keep the two handkerchiefs 
steeped with his blood as a memorial and a 
warning to his master. 

Still seeing nothing, learning nothing, taking 
interest in nothing, by turns morosely apathetic 
and brutally violent, continually intriguing 
with women, mercenary or depraved, Vittorio 
Alfieri had, at twenty-five, less things to be 
proud of, but perhaps less also to regret as 
absolutely dishonorable, than most young men 
of his time. He had never lied, never seduced, 
never stooped to anything which seemed to 
him demeaning. He was splashed with vice 
from head to foot, but he was neither unnerved 
nor warped by it. A subject of constant gos- 
sip, of frequent scandal, with his teams of 
half-tame horses, his flashy clothes, his furious 
passions for worthless women, his moroseness 
and violence, he was still, so far, a very neg- 
ative character, a mere mass of rough material, 
out of which a man might be made. But who 
should mould that matter t It is extremely 



96 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

difficult to understand how it came about, as 
difficult almost as to understand how a certain 
amount of inorganic molecules will sometimes 
suddenly seem to obey an impulse from within, 
and become an organism, a yeast plant, or a 
microscopic animal ; but whether or not we 
succeed in understanding the how and why of 
the phenomenon, the phenomenon nevertheless 
took place ; and this unorganized mass of 
passions called Vittorio Alfieri, this chaotic 
thing without a higher life or a purpose in the 
world, only partially sensitive, and seemingly 
quite impervious to external influence, suddenly 
obeyed some inner impulse (perhaps some 
accumulation of unnoticed effects from with- 
out), and organized itself into a man, a thinker 
and a writer. 

Alfieri had always been capable of contempt 
for others, and largely also of contempt for 
himself ; blind and dull, impulsive and indif- 
ferent by turns, he had yet felt acutely the 
ignominy of certain excesses, whether of avar- 
ice, or brutality, or love (if love it may be 
called), which had ever and anon broken the 
monotony of his aimless life. Of these igno- 
minies the one he had felt most, perhaps because 
it deprived him of the independence which 
even in his stupidest times he put his pride in, 
was the ignominy of love ; that is to say, of 



ALFIERI. 97 

what love was to him, unworthy incapacity of 
doing without a woman whom he despised and 
even occasionally hated. The very fits of moral 
hysterics, nay, of moral St. Vitus' dance, of 
which such love maladies largely consisted, 
sickened him, degraded him in his own eyes 
like some disgusting physical infirmity. In his 
twenty-second year he had such a love malady : 
he had been the scandal of all London in an 
intrigue with a certain very lovely Lady Ligo- 
nier, who, divorced by her husband for her 
guilt with the young Italian, was on the point 
of being joyfully taken to wife by Alfieri, 
when it came out that before being his mis- 
tress she had been the mistress of her own 
groom ; a termination *of the adventure which, 
much as it distressed the writer of Alfieri's 
autobiography, is extremely satisfactory to the 
reader. A few years later, after a variety of minor 
love affairs, he became entangled at Turin in 
the nets of a Marchesa di Prie, a rather faded 
Armida of very tarnished reputation, and whom 
he thoroughly despised and even disliked at 
the very height of his attachment. The strug- 
gles between his sense of weariness and deg- 
radation and his unworthy love for this woman 
half wore him out, and brought on a severe 
malady, from which he recovered only to swear 
he would never enter her house again, and to 
4 



98 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

return to it as soon as he could stand on his 
feet. 

The beautiful social customs of eighteenth- 
century Italy authorized and even imposed upon 
a man who had accepted the position of cava- 
liere sei'vente (a sort of pseudo-platonic vice- 
husbandship which covered illicit connections 
with a worldly propriety) to attend upon his 
lady from the moment of her getting up in the 
morning to the moment when she returned 
home or dismissed her guests at night, with 
only a few intervals during which the lover 
might have his meals or pay his visits ; so, 
when the Marchesa di Prie fell ill of a malady 
which required absolute repose and silence, 
Alfieri was bound to spend the whole morning 
seated at the foot of her bed. During one of 
these weary watches it came into his head to 
kill time by scribbling some dramatic scenes 
on loose sheets of paper, which he hid during 
the intervals of his visits under the cushion of 
an arm-chair. A Piedmontese and a thorough 
ignoramus, he had scarcely ever attempted to 
write even so much as a letter in Italian ; and 
as to a literary composition in any language, 
such a thing had never occurred to him. The 
Cleopatra thus written in his lady's bed-room 
and secreted under the chair cushion was a 
most worthless performance, but it made 



ALFIERI. 99 

Alfieri an author. Always devoured by a 
desire to shine, hitherto by the excellence of 
his get-up, the beauty of his person, and the 
number of his horses, it suddenly flashed 
across him that he might shine in future as a 
poet. This was the turning-point in his life, 
or what he called his liberation. But, like a 
man bound in all his limbs, and who at length 
has slipped the cord from off one hand, there 
still remained to Alfieri an infinite amount of 
struggle, of bitter effort, of hopeless inaction, 
before he could completely liberate himself 
from the bonds of sloth, of worldly vanity, dis- 
sipation and unworthy love, before he could 
step forth and walk steadily along the new 
road which had appeared to him. His igno- 
rance was appalling. He could no longer con- 
strue a line of Latin ; he had not for months 
opened a book ; and as to Italian, he knew it 
no better than any Piedmontese street porter. 
His idleness, his habit of absolute vacuity, was 
even worse : his desire to shine before the 
frivolous women, the inane young men of 
Turin, nay, merely to have himself, his well-cut 
coat, his well-frizzled hair, the horse he rode or 
drove, noticed by any chance loafer in the 
street, was another almost incredible obstacle ; 
and, worst of all, there was his degrading serf- 
dom to a woman whom he knew he neither 



100 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

loved nor respected, and who had never loved, 
still less respected, him. But Alfieri, once 
awakened out of that strange, long torpor of 
his youth, was able to put forth as active and 
invincible forces all that extraordinary obsti- 
nacy, that morose doggedness, that indifference 
to comfort and" pleasure, that brutal violence 
which had more than once in their negative 
condition made him seem more like some wild 
animal or half-savage monomaniac than an ordi- 
nary young man under five-and-twenty. He 
had, moreover, at this moment, when all the en- 
ergies of his nature suddenly burst out, a power 
of deliberate, complacent and pitiless moral self- 
vivisection, a power of performing upon his 
character such cutting and ripping-open opera- 
tions as he thought beneficial to himself, which 
makes one think of the abnormal faculty of 
enduring pain, the abnormal and almost cruel 
satisfaction in examining the mechanism of 
one's own suffering, occasionally displayed by 
hysterical women ; and which brings back the 
impression already conveyed by the morbid 
sensitiveness, the frenzied violence, the moody 
torpor of his youth, that there was something 
abnormal in Alfieri's whole nature. He was 
now employing that very hysterical satisfaction 
in pain and impatience of half measures, to 
reduce himself, by heroic means, to at least 



ALFIERI. lOI 

such moral and mental health as would permit 
the full exercise of his faculties. There exists 
a diary of his, written in 1777, which is an 
almost unique example of the seemingly cold, 
but really excited and hysterical kind of self- 
vivisection of which I have spoken. Alfieri 
had always been extraordinarily truthful, not 
merely for his time and country, but truthful 
quite beyond the limits of a mere negative 
virtue. But he was also, what seems almost 
incompatible with this ferocious truthfulness, 
excessively self-conscious and morally attitudi- 
nizing, a thin-skinned poseur. To reconcile 
these seemingly contradictory characteristics, 
to become what he wished to appear, to pose 
as what he was, to make himself up (if I may 
say so) as himself, to intensify what he recog- 
nized as his main characteristics and efface all 
his other ones, now became to Alfieri a sort of 
unconscious aim of life, closely connected with 
his avowed desire to become a great poet ; ''the 
reason of which desire," he himself wrote in his 
diary, ''is my immoderate ambition, which, 
finding no other field, has devoted itself entirely 
to literature." Nothing can be more serious, 
as I have already remarked, than this diary of 
Alfieri's struggles, where he notes, day by day, 
the laziness, the meanness, the want of frank- 
ness to himself and others, the despicable van- 



I02 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

ity, the attempt to appear what he is not, the 
indulged unfounded suspiciousness towards his- 
friends, all the little base defects which must 
have pained a nature like his more than any- 
real sinfulness, as the prodding of a surgeon's 
instruments would have agonized such a man 
more than an actual amputation. He narrates 
in extenso all his vacillations about nothing at 
all, all his givings way to laziness, all his insin- 
cere confidences made to others. One morning 
is consumed in debating whether or not he will 
buy a certain Indian walking-stick : *' Torn by 
avarice and the ambition of having it, I go away 
without deciding whether I will buy it or not, 
yet I know full well that before two days are 
out I shall have bought it. Seeking to under- 
stand this contradiction, I discover a thousand 
ridiculous dirtinesses in my character {mille 
ridicole porcheide)'' Another day he notes 
down, after describing the mean envy with 
which he has listened to the praises of another 
member of his little club of dilettante authors : 
'* I do believe that as much praise as is being 
given and will ever be given to all mankind for 
every sort of praiseworthy thing, I should like 
to snap up for myself alone." Again, another 
day he writes : '' More lazy than ever. Walking 
with a friend, and talking about our incomes, 
etc. I thought I was giving him a perfectly 



ALFIERL 103 

open account of my money matters ; but, with 
the best intention of telling him the truth, I 
find that, in order to deceive myself as well 
as him, I increased my fortune by one-fifth." 
Again : '' I had some doubts whether, as it was 
blowing hard on the promenade, I would go 
on as far as where the ladies were walking; 
because, knowing that I was looking pale and 
ill, and that the wind had taken the powder 
out of my hair, I was unwilling to show myself 
in a condition so unsuitable to my pretensions 
to beauty." 

But while thus analyzing himself, while work- 
ing at Latin and grammar like a school-boy, 
this fashionable young man, ashamed of being 
seen when he was not in good looks, ashamed 
of having one horse less than usual, was contin- 
ually ruminating over the glory for which he in- 
tended living, and which he appears never for a 
moment to have doubted of attaining. " In my 
mind, which is completely given up to the idea 
of glory, I frequently go over the plan of my 
life. I determine that at forty-five I will write 
no more, but merely enjoy the fame which I 
shall have obtained, or imagine that I have ob- 
tained, and prepare myself for death. One 
thing only makes me uneasy : I fear that as I 
approach the prescribed limit, I may push it 
continually back, and that at forty-five I may 



104 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

still be thinking only of continuing to live, and, 
perhaps, of continuing to scribble. Hard as I 
try to think, or to make others think, that I am 
different from the rest of mankind, I fear, I 
tremble lest I be extremely like them." 

But in order to devote himself to the pursuit 
of literary glory, one thing remained to be 
achieved by this strange, self-conscious, frank, 
contemptuous and vain creature, by this young 
man who, even in his weaknesses, has a certain 
heroic air about him. It was necessary to break 
through the bonds of unworthy love. Unable 
to trust any longer to his often-baffled resolution 
and self-command, Alfieri devised a primitive 
and theatrical remedy too much in harmony with 
his whole nature to be otherwise than effica- 
cious. The lady occupied a house in the great 
rococo square of San Carlo, opposite to the one 
which he rented ; she could not go in or out of 
her door without being seen by Alfieri, and the 
sight of her was too much for him ; he invari- 
ably broke all his resolves and went across the 
square to his Armida. Knowing this, Alfieri 
obliged a friend of his to receive from him a sol- 
emn written promise to the effect that he would 
not merely never go to the lady, nor take any no- 
tice of her messages, but that, until he felt him- 
self absolutely indifferent and beyond her reach, 
he would go out only in solitary places and at 



ALFIERI. 105 

unlikely hours, and spend the greater part of 
the day seated at his window, looking at her 
house, seeing her pass, hearing her, spoken of, 
receiving her letters, without ever approaching 
her or sending her the smallest message. As a 
pledge of this engagement, Alfieri cut off his 
long red hair, and sent the plait to his friend, 
leaving himself in a state of crop-headedness, 
which made it utterly impossible, in that day 
when wigs had been given up but short hair had 
not yet been adopted, for him to appear any- 
where. And then he had himself tied to his 
chair with ropes hidden under his cloak, and 
spent day after day looking at his mistress' win- 
dows, quite unable to read a word or attend to 
conversation, raging and sobbing and howling 
like a demoniac, but never asking to be untied : 
until, at the end of a fortnight or three weeks, 
he was rewarded, most characteristically, by 
being at once delivered of all love for his lady, 
and inspired with the idea for a sonnet. 

Alfieri worked harder and harder at his Latin 
and Italian lessons, sketched out the plan of 
several plays, and then, in the early summer of 
1776, got together his horses, procured a per- 
mission to travel from the King of Sardinia, and 
set out for Tuscany in order to learn the lan- 
guage in which he was to achieve that great lit- 
erary glory to which he had dedicated his life. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE CAVALIERE SERVENTE. 

Alfieri's greatest terror in life was to fall in 
love once more. All his love affairs had been 
degrading to his good sense, his will and his 
manhood : they had been odious, even at the 
moment, to his extraordinary innate passion, or, 
one might almost say, monomania for independ- 
ence ; he who even in his dullest and most inane 
years had hated the thought of any sort of mili- 
tary or diplomatic position which should imply 
subjection to a despotic government, whose only 
strong feeling about the world in general had 
long been a fierce hatred and contempt both for 
those who tyrannized and those who were tyran- 
nized over, this Alfieri had always, as he tells 
us, fled, though unsuccessfully, from the pres- 
ence of women whose social position (though 
the words sound like a sarcasm) was sufficiently 
good to make any regular love intrigue possible 
or probable. How much more must he not de- 
fend his liberty, now that he saw before him the 
direct road to glory, and felt within himself the 
power to journey along it. 



THE CAVALIERE SERVENTE. lO/ 

Thus it was, as he explains in his autobiog- 
raphy, that on his first arrival in Florence, hear- 
ing every one praising the character and talents 
of the wife of Charles Edward Stuart, and see- 
ing the beautiful young woman at theatres and 
in the pubHc promenade, he resolutely declined 
to be introduced to her. The very charm of the 
impression which she had thus accidentally 
made upon him, the vivid image of those very 
dark eyes (I am translating his words, and must 
explain that her eyes, which seemed blue to 
Bonstetten and dark to Alfieri, were in reality 
of that hazel color which gives great prominence 
to the pupil, and therefore leaves the idea of 
black eyes), contrasting with the brilliant fair 
skin and pale blonde hair, of the graciousness 
and sweetness and perhaps even a certain sad 
austerity in her whole appearance and manner 
— all this made Alfieri determine to avoid all 
personal acquaintance. 

But after some months at Siena, where his 
thoughts had been entirely absorbed in the lit- 
erary projects which he discussed with his new 
friend, the grave and good and serious-minded 
Gori, and one or two Sienese professors, after 
that first feeling of attraction had died away, 
and he felt himself covered, as it were, with an 
impenetrable armor of poetic interests, Alfieri 
decided, on his return to Florence, that he was 



I08 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 

quite sufficiently of a new man to expose him- 
self without any danger to such a lady as the 
Countess of Albany. He was, after all, a dif- 
ferent individual from that inane, dull, violent 
young man who in the vacuity of life had raged 
and roared in the chains of unworthy love. 
And she, she also, was quite a different woman 
from the Lady Ligonier and from the Marchesa 
di Prie, the shameless, unfaithful wives and 
heartless, vain, worldly coquettes who had made 
such havoc of his heart. She was a cold, virtu- 
ous, extremely intellectual woman, trying to 
find consolation for her quietly and bravely-sup- 
ported miseries in study, in abstract interests 
which should take away her thoughts from the 
sickening reality of things ; a woman who would 
be valuable as a friend to a poet, and who 
would know how to value his friendship. And 
he, continually seeking for people who could 
understand his literary ambitions, with whom 
he could discuss all his poetical projects, and 
from whom he might receive assistance in this 
new intellectual life, was he not in need of such 
a friendship '^. Would he not appreciate its use- 
fulness and uniqueness sufficiently to see that it 
did not turn to a mere useless and demoralizing 
love affair t There may also have been some- 
thing very reassuring to Alfieri's apprehensions 
in the knowledge that he would be dealing, not 



THE CAVALIERE SERVENTE. 109 

with an Italian woman, accustomed and almost 
socially obliged to hold a man in the degrading 
bonds of cicisbeism, but with a foreigner, the 
jealously-guarded wife of a sort of legendary 
ogre, with whom, however much the old fury of 
love might awaken in him, there could by no 
possibility be anything beyond the most strictly- 
watched friendship. So Alfieri went to the 
palace of the Count of Albany ; and, having 
once been, returned there. 

The palace bought by Charles Edward about 
1776 stands in the most remote and peaceful 
quarter of Florence. A few quiet streets, un- 
broken by shop fronts and unfrequented by 
vehicles, lead up to that quarter ; streets of 
low whitewashed convent walls overtopped by 
trees, of silent palaces, of unpretending little 
houses of the seventeenth or eighteenth cen- 
tury, from behind whose iron window-gratings 
and blistered green shutters one expects even 
now, as one passes in the silence of the summer 
afternoons, to hear the faint jangle of some 
harpischord-strummed minuet, the turns and 
sudden high notes of some long-forgotten song 
by Cimarosa or Paisello. It is a region of dead 
walls, over which bend the acacias and elms, 
over which shoot up the cypresses and cedars 
of innumerable convent and palace-gardens, on 
whose flower-beds and fountains and quincunxes 



no COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

the first-floor windows look down. In the midst 
of all this, at the corner of two very quiet streets, 
stands the palace, now of the Duke of San 
Clemente, an ungainly, yellow structure of vari- 
ous epochs, with a pretty late sixteenth-century 
belvedere tower on one side ; a lot of shuttered 
and heavily-grated seventeenth-century win- 
dows, ornamented with stone stay-laces and 
tags, upon the dark street ; and to the back a 
desolate old garden, where the vines have 
crawled over the stonework, and the grotesque 
seventeenth-century statues, green and yellow 
with lichen, stand in niches among the ill- 
trimmed hedges of ilex and laurel : the most old- 
world house and garden in the old-world part 
of the town. The eighteenth century still 
seems very near as we walk in those streets and 
look in, through the railings, at the ilex and 
laurel quincunxes, the lichened statues of that 
garden ; and from the roof of the house still 
floats, creaking in the wind, regardless of the 
triumph of the Hanoverians, unconscious of the 
many banners which have been thrown, mere 
heaps of obsolete colored tatters, on the dust- 
heap, a rusty metal weather-vane, bearing the 
initials of Carolus Rex, the last successor of the 
standard that was raised in Glenfinnan. 

In this house was now developing one of the 
most singular loves that ever were. Shortly 



THE CAVA LIE RE SERVENTE. Ill 

after his introduction to the Countess of Al- 
bany, Alfieri, terrified lest he might be forfeit- 
ing his spiritual liberty once more, took to flight 
and tried to forget the lady in a mad journey to 
Rome. But he had not forgotten her ; and on 
his passage through Siena, returning to Flor- 
ence, he had explained his feelings, his fears, to 
his friend Francesco Gori. This Gori, a young 
Sienese of the middle class, extremely cultured, 
of "antique uprightness, " to use the eighteenth- 
century phrase, seems to have taken to his 
heart, as one might some wild younger brother, 
or some eccentric, moody child, the strange, 
self-engrossed, passionate Piedmontese. A 
gentle, grave and quiet man, he had loved the 
magnanimity and independence so curiously 
mingled with mere vanity and egotism in 
Alfieri's nature ; he had never tired of hearing 
his friend's plans for the future, had never 
smiled at his almost comic certainty of supreme 
greatness ; he had never lost patience with the 
self -meritorious egotism which made all Alfieri's 
actions seem the one interest of the world in 
Alfieri's own eyes. To Francesco Gori, there- 
fore, Alfieri went for advice : ought he, or ought 
he not, to fly from this new love while it was 
still possible to do so } 

The grave and virtuous Gori answered that 
he should not : this new love had been sent to 



112 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

him as a cure for all baser loves ; instead of 
crushing it as an obstacle to his higher life and 
his glory, he should thankfully cultivate it as an 
incentive and assistance in working out his in- 
tellectual redemption. 

Let us pause and consider for a moment the 
meaning of Aliieri's question and the meaning 
of Gori's answer; let us try and realize the ideas 
and feelings of two honorable men, seeking a 
higher life, in a country so near our own as 
Italy, and so short a while ago as the year i///. 
Here was Alfieri, passionately desirous to re- 
deem his own existence by intellectual efforts, 
and confident of a vague mission to awaken his 
countrymen to his own nobler feelings ; to the 
contempt of sensual pleasures and wordly vani- 
ties, the hatred of political and religious servi- 
tude, the love of truth and justice, the love of 
Italy, Here was this Alfieri, at the very outset 
of his new career, solemnly confiding to his 
kindest and wisest friend the scruples, the fears, 
which restrained him from seeking the company 
of a woman whom he was beginning to love, 
and who was beginning to love him, a young 
woman married by mere worldly convention to a 
sickly, brutal and brutish drunkard, old enough 
to be her father. And what were these scru- 
ples ? Merely that a new love might distract 
Alfieri from his plans of study and work, that a 



THE CAVALIERE SERVENTE. II3 

woman might cheat him of glory, and Italy of 
the tragic drama which would school her to 
virtue. That there could be any other scruples 
appears never to have crossed Alfieri's brain : 
that there could be any reason to pause and ask 
himself whether he was doing wrong or ill be- 
fore exposing to temptation the woman whom 
he loved, and the honor which he loved more 
than her ; whether he had a right to return to 
the palace of Charles Edward, and, while re- 
ceiving his hospitality, while enjoying his con- 
fidence, to teach the wife of his host how to 
love another man than her husband ; whether he 
had a right to return to the presence of that 
beautiful and intellectual lady who had hitherto 
suffered only from the brutishness of her hus- 
band, and add to these sufferings the sufferings 
of hopeless love, the sufferings of a guilty con- 
science ? 

But to the Italian of the eighteenth century, 
even to the man who most thoroughly despised 
and loathed his country's and century's corrup- 
tion, no such scruple ever came. What consid- 
eration need ai>y man or any woman waste 
upon a husband 1 What possible disgrace could 
come to a woman in having a lover.'* And did 
not the frantic jealousy of the besotted old 
husband, his continual attendance, his perpet- 
ual spying, most effectually remove any fur- 
ther consideration there might be for him ? 



114 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

I scarcely know whether it is a thing about 
which to be cheerful or sad, proud or ashamed ; 
but the more one studies the ideas and feelings 
of even one's nearest neighbors, in place or in 
time, the more is one impressed with the sense 
that, say what people choose, men and women do 
not think and feel, even upon the most important 
subjects, in anything like a uniform manner. 
Social misarrangements, which are crimes 
towards the individual, are invariably partially 
righted, made endurable, by individual re-ar- 
rangements, which are crimes towards society. 
The woman was not consulted by her parents 
before her marriage ; she was not restrained by 
her conscience afterwards ; she was given for 
ambition to a man whose tenure of her received 
legal and religious sanction ; she gave herself 
for love to a man whose possession of her was 
against society and against religion ; but society 
received her to its parties and the Church gave 
her its communion. And thus, in Italy and in 
the eighteenth century, where no one had 
found any fault at a girl of nineteen being mar- 
ried by proxy to a man who turned out to be a 
disgusting and brutal sot, no one also could find 
any fault at a young man of twenty-eight seek- 
ing and obtaining the love of a married woman 
of twenty-five. The immoral law had produced 
the immoral lawlessness. So, to the scruples 



THE CAVALIERE SERVENTE. I15 

of Alfieri Francesco Gori had answered: ''Re- 
turn to Florence. " 

We shall now see how, out of this vile piece 
of prose, the higher nature of Alfieri and of the 
Countess of Albany, and (what a satire upon 
poetic and platonic affection ! ) most of all, the 
monomaniac jealousy of Charles Edward, con- 
trived to make a sort of poetry. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE ESCAPE. 

Alfieri's fears had been groundless. His love 
for the wife of Charles Edward Stuart — a love, 
he tells us, quite different from any he had pre- 
viously experienced, quiet, pure and solemn — 
was destined not to interfere with that austere 
process of detaching his soul from the base pas- 
sions of the world, and devoting it to the crea- 
tion of a new style of poetry, to the achievement 
of a new kind of glory ; nay, rather, by bringing 
to the surface whatever capacity for tenderness 
and self-restraint and respect for others had 
hitherto lurked within this fantastic nature, 
this new love helped to complete that strange 
monumental personality of Alfieri — a personal- 
ity more striking, more ideal, than any of those 
plays by which he hoped to regenerate Italy, 
and which has been far more potent than his 
works in the moral regeneration of his country. 
Alfieri's youth had been illiterate and stupid ; 
and he required, in order to make up for so 
much waste of time and waste of spirit, that 



THE ESCAPE. 11/ 

he should now be surrounded by an atmosphere 
as intensely intellectual as the atmosphere in 
which he had previously lived had been the re- 
verse. After the long spiritual numbness of 
his earlier years, this soul, if it was to be kept 
alive, must be kept in an almost artificially high 
spiritual temperature, and continually plied with 
spiritual cordials. 

These advantages he obtained in the love, or, 
we ought rather to say, the friendship of the 
Countess of Albany, and it is extremely improb- 
able whether he would have obtained them other- 
wise. Irritable and vain and moody, at once ex- 
cessively persuaded of his own dramatic mission 
and morbidly diffident of his actual powers of 
carrying it out, contemptuous of others and of 
himself, Alfieri, who required such constant sym- 
pathy and encouragement in his work, was not 
the man who could hope to obtain much of either 
from other men, whom his excessive pretensions, 
his ups and downs of humor, his very dissatis- 
faction with himself, must have quickly ex- 
hausted of the small amount of brotherly ten- 
derness which seems to exist in the literary 
brotherhood. He did, indeed, meet a degree of 
sincere helpfulness and friendliness from the 
members of the Turinese Literary Club ; from 
Cesarotti, the translator of Ossian; from Parini, 
the great Milanese satirist, and from one or two 



Il8 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

other men of letters ; whicli shows that there is 
more kindness in the world than he ever would 
admit, and confirms me in my remark that he 
was singularly well treated by fate and mankind. 
But all this was very lukewarm sympathy ; and 
except from his two great friends, Francesco 
Gori and Tommaso di Caluso, a difficult-tem- 
pered man like Alfieri could receive only luke- 
warmness. Now what he required was sym- 
pathy, admiration, adoration, of the most burning 
description. This was possible, towards such a 
man, only from a woman. But where find the 
woman who could give it, among the convent- 
educated, early-corrupted, frivolous ladies of 
Italy, to whom love-making was the highest in- 
terest in life, but an interest only a trifle higher 
than card-playing, dancing or dressing } Where, 
even among the very small number of women 
like Silvia Verza at Verona, Isabella Albrizzi at 
Venice, or Paolina Castiglione at Milan, who 
actually had some amount of culture and actu- 
ally prided themselves on it.? The rank and 
file of Italian ladies could give him only another 
Marchesa di Prie, a little better or a little worse, 
another woman who would degrade him in the 
sensual and inane routine of a cicisbeo. The 
exceptional ladies were even worse. Fancy this 
morbid, conceited, self-doubtful, violent, moody 
Alfieri accepting literary sympathy in a room 



THE ESCAPE, IIQ 

full of small provincial lions — sympathy which 
had to be divided with half a dozen others; 
learned persons who edited Latin inscriptions, 
dapper poet priestlets, their pockets crammed 
with sonnets on ladies' hats, opera-singers, ca- 
nary birds, births, deaths and marriages, and 
ponderous pedants of all sorts and descriptions ! 
Why, a lady who set up as the muse of a hot- 
tempered and brow-beating creature like Alfieri, 
a man whom consciousness of imperfect educa- 
tion made horribly sensitive — such a lady would 
have lost all the accustomed guests of her salon 
in ten days' time. Herein, therefore, consisted 
the uniqueness of the Countess of Albany, in 
the fact that she was everything to Alfieri, which 
no other woman could be. Originally better edu- 
cated than her Italian contemporaries, the ex- 
Canoness of Mons, half-Flemish, half-German by 
family, French by training, and connected with 
England through her marriage with the Pre- 
tender, had the advantage of open doors upon 
several fields of culture. She could read the 
books of four different nations — a very rare ac- 
complishment in her day ; and she was, more- 
over, one of those women, rarer even in the 
eighteenth century than now-a-days, whose na- 
ture, while unproductive in any particular line, 
is intensely and almost exclusively intellectual, 
and in the intellectual domain even more in- 



I20 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

tensely and almost exclusively literary — women 
who are born readers, to whom a new poem is as 
great an excitement as a new toilette, a treatise 
of philosophy (we shall see the Countess de- 
vouring Kant long before he had been heard of 
out of Germany) more exquisitely delightful 
than a symphony. And this woman, thus edu- 
cated, with this immense fund of intellectual 
energy, was living, not a normal life with the 
normal distracting influences of an endurable 
husband, of children and society, but a life of 
frightful mental and moral isolation, by the side, 
or rather in the loathsome shadow, of a degraded, 
sordid, violent and jealous brute, from the real- 
ity of whose beastly excesses and bestial fury, 
of whose vomitings and oaths and outrages and 
blows, she could take refuge only in the unreal 
world of books. 

With such a woman, Alfieri, accepted as an 
intimate by the husband, who doubtless thought 
one hare-brained poet more easy to manage 
than two or three fashionable gallants — with 
such a woman as this, Alfieri might talk over 
plans of self-culture and work, his plays, his 
essays on liberty and literature, and all the 
things by which he intended to redeem Italy 
and make himself immortal, without any fear of 
his listener ever growing weary : from her he 
could receive that passionate sympathy and en- 



THE ESCAPE. 121 

couragement without which life and work were 
impossible to him. For we must bear in mind 
what a man like Alfieri, in the heyday of his 
youth, his beauty, and that genius which was 
the indomitable energy and independence of 
his nature, must have been in the eyes of the 
Countess of Albany. She had been married at 
nineteen — she was now twenty-six ; in those 
seven years of suffering there had been ample 
time to obliterate all traces of the frivolous, 
worldly girl whom Bonstetten had seen light- 
heartedly laughing at her old husband's jokes ; 
there had been plenty of time to produce in this 
excessively intellectual nature that vague dis- 
satisfaction, that desire for the ideal, which is 
the price too often paid for the consolation of 
mere abstract and literary interests. The pres- 
sure of constant disgust and terror at her hus- 
band's doings, the terrible mental and moral 
solitude of living by such a husband's side, had 
probably wrought up Louise d' Albany to the 
very highest and almost morbid refinement of 
nature — a refinement far surpassing the normal 
condition of her character, even as the extra 
fining off of already delicate features by illness 
will make them surpass by far their healthy 
degree of beauty. In such a mental condition 
the sense of what her husband was must have 
exasperated her imagination quite as much as 



122 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

his actual loathsomeness must have repelled 
her feelings ; the knowledge of the frightful 
moral and intellectual fall of Charles Edward 
must have been as bad as the filthy place to 
which he had fallen. And opposite to the 
image of the Pretender must constantly have 
arisen the image of Alfieri — opposite to the 
image of the man, once heroic and charming and 
brilliant, who had sold his heroism and his 
charm, his mind and his manhood, for the bes- 
tial pleasure of drink — who had rewarded the 
devotion and self-sacrifice and noble enthusiasm 
of his followers by the sight, worse than the 
scaffold on Tower Hill, of their idol turning into 
a half -maniac, besotted brute ; opposite to this 
image of degradation must have arisen the 
image of the man who had wrestled with the 
baser passions of his nature, who had broken 
through the base habits of his youth, who had 
fashioned himself into a noble moral shape as 
the marble is fashioned by the hand of the 
sculptor ; who was struggling still, not merely 
with the difficulties of his art, but with what- 
ever he thought mean and slothful in himself. 

Some eighteen months after their first ac- 
quaintance Alfieri announced to the wife of 
Charles Edward that he had just happily settled 
a most important piece of business, the success 
of which was one of the most fortunate things 



THE ESCAPE. 123 

of his life. He had made a gift of all his estates 
to his sister, reserving for himself only a very- 
moderate yearly income ; he had reduced him- 
self from comparative wealth to comparative 
poverty ; he had cut himself off from ever mak- 
ing a suitable marriage ; he had made himself a 
pensioner of his sister's husband: but at this 
price he had bought independence — he was no 
longer the subject of the King of Sardinia nor 
of any sovereign or state in the world. 

The passion for political liberty, the abhor- 
rence of any kind of despotism, however glorious 
or however paternal, had grown in Alfieri with 
every journey he had made through France, 
Spain, Germany, Russia — with every sojourn in 
England ; it had grown with every page of Livy 
and Tacitus, with every line of Dante and Pe- 
trarch, which he had read ; it had grown with 
every word that he himself had written. He had 
determined to be the poet who should make men 
ashamed of being slaves and ashamed of being 
tyrants. But he was himself the subject of the 
little military despotism of Piedmont, whose 
nobles were required, every time they wished to 
travel or live abroad, to beg civilly for leave of ab- 
sence, which was usually most uncivilly granted ; 
and one of those laws threatened any person who 
should print books in foreign countries, and 
without the permission of the Sardinian censor, 



124 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

with a heavy fine, and, if necessary, with corporal 
chastisement. 

In order to become a poet Alfieri required to 
become a free agent ; and the only way to be- 
come a free agent, to break through the bars of 
what he called his " abominable native cage," 
the only way to obtain the power of writing 
what he wished to write, was to give up all his 
fortune and live upon the charity of the relatives 
whom he had enriched. So, during the past 
months, he had been in constant correspondence 
with his sister, his brother-in-law and his lawyer ; 
and now he had succeeded in ridding himself of 
all his estates and all his capital. The Countess 
of Albany knew Alfieri sufficiently well by this 
time to understand that this alienation of all 
his property was a real sacrifice. Alfieri was 
the vainest and most ostentatious of men ; young, 
handsome, showy and eccentric, accustomed to 
cut a grand figure wherever he went, it must 
have cost him a twinge to be obliged to reduce 
his hitherto brilliant establishment, to dismiss 
nearly all his servants, to sell most of his horses, 
to exchange his embroidered velvets and satins 
for a plain black coat for the evening and a plain 
blue coat for the afternoon. The worst sacrifice 
of all he doubtless confided, with savage bitter- 
ness, to the Countess, as he confided it to the 
readers of his autobiography : it was to resign 



THE ESCAPE 1 25 

the nominal service of Piedmont — to put aside, 
for good and all, that brilliant Sardinian uniform 
in which he looked to such advantage. 

We can imagine how this subject was talked 
over — how Alfieri, with that savage pleasure 
of his in the self-infliction of pain and humili- 
ation, exposed to the Countess all the little, 
mean motives which had deterred him or which 
had encouraged him in his liberation from po- 
litical servitude ; we can imagine how she chid 
him for his rash step, and how, at the same 
time, she felt a delicious pride in the meanness 
which he so frankly revealed, in the rashness 
which she so severely reproved ; we can imag- 
ine how the thought of Alfieri, who had thus 
sacrificed fortune, luxury, vanity, to the desire 
to be free, met in the Countess of Albany's 
mind the thought of Charles Edward, living the 
pensioner of a sovereign who had insulted him 
and of a sovereign whom he had cheated, spend- 
ing in liquor the money which France had paid 
him to get himself an heir and the Stuarts 
another king. 

A strange and dangerous situation, but one 
whose danger was completely neutralized. Of 
all the various persons who speak of the extra- 
ordinary friendship between Vittorio Alfieri 
and Louise d'Albany which existed at this 
time, not one even ventures to hint that the 



126 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

relations between them exceeded in the slight- 
est degree the limits of mere passionate friend- 
ship ; and the solemn words of Alfieri, in whom 
truthfulness was not merely an essential part 
of his natural character, but an even more es- 
sential part of his self-idealized personality, 
merely confirm the words of all contemporary 
writers. Now, if there was a country where an 
intrigue between a woman noted tor her virtue 
and a poet noted for his eccentricity would, had 
it existed, have been joyfully laid hold of by 
gossip, it was certainly this utterly-demoralized 
Italy of cavalieri serventi : every fashionable 
woman and every fast man would have felt a 
personal satisfaction in tearing to pieces the 
reputation of a lady whose whole character and 
life had been a censure upon theirs. But, as 
there are women the intensity of whose pure- 
mindedness, felt in every feature and gesture 
and word, paralyzes even the most ribald wish 
to shock or outrage, and momentarily drags up 
towards themselves the very people who would 
dearly love to drag them down even for a sec- 
ond ; so also it would appear that there are 
situations so strange, meetings of individuals so 
exceptional, that calumny itself is unable to 
attack them. No one said a word against 
Alfieri and the Countess ; and Charles Edward 
himself, jealous as he was of any kind of inter- 



THE ESCAPE, 12/ 

ference in his concerns, appears never to have 
attempted to rid himself of his wife's new 
friend. 

Much, of course, must be set down to the 
very madness of the Pretender's jealousy, to 
his more than Oriental systematic guarding and 
watching of his wife. Mann, we must remem- 
ber, had written, long before Alfieri appeared 
upon the scene, that Charles Edward never 
went out without his wife and never let her 
go out without him ; he barricaded her apart- 
ment and was never further off than the next 
room. Charles Edward undoubtedly conferred 
upon two people, living in a day of excessive 
looseness of manners, the inestimable advantage 
of confining their love within the bounds of 
friendship, of crushing all that might have been 
base, of liberating all that could be noble, of 
turning what might have been merely a passion 
after the pattern of Rousseau into a passion 
after the pattern of Dante. But what Charles 
Edward could not do, what no human being 
or accidental circumstances could bring about, 
was due to the special nature of Alfieri and of 
the Countess ; namely, that this strange pla- 
tonic passion, instead of dying out after a very 
brief time, merely intensified, became long-lived, 
inextinguishable, nay, continued in its absolute 
austerity and purity long after every obstacle 



128 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

and restraint had been removed, except the 
obstacles and restraints which, from the very 
ideahty of its own nature, increased for itself. 
And, if we look facts calmly in the face, and, 
letting alone all poetical jargon, ask ourselves 
the plain psychological explanation, we see that 
such things not only could, but, considering the 
character of the Countess of Albany and of 
Alfieri, must have been. The Countess had 
found in Alfieri the satisfaction of those intel- 
lectual and ideal cravings which in a nature like 
hers, and in a situation like hers, must have 
been the strongest and most durable necessi- 
ties. Alfieri, on the other hand, sick of his 
past life, mortally afraid of falling once more 
under the tyranny of his baser nature, seeking 
on all sides assistance in that terrible struggle 
of the winged intellect out of the caterpillar 
cocoon in which it had lain torpid so long, was 
wrought up, if ever a man was, to the pitch of 
enjoying, of desiring a mere intellectual pas- 
sion just in proportion as it was absolutely and 
completely intellectual. 

A poet especially in his conception of his own 
personality, an artist who manipulated his own 
nature, 2, poseur whose /<?i'^ was his concentrated 
self cleared of all things which recalled the 
vulgar herd; moreover, a furiously literary 
temper with a mad devotion to Dante and Pe- 



THE ESCAPE. 1 29 

trarch, — Alfieri must have found in this love, 
which fate in the Pretender's person ordained 
to be platonic, the crowning characteristic of 
his present personaHty, the almost miraculous 
confirmation of his mystic relationship to the 
lover of Beatrice and the lover of Laura. And, 
in the knowledge of what he was to this poor, 
tormented young wife ; in the consciousness of 
being the only ray of light in this close-shut- 
tered prison — nay, rather bedlam-like exist- 
ence ; in the sense of how completely the 
happiness of Louise d' Albany depended upon 
him, whatever there was of generous and dutiful 
in the selfish and self-willed nature of Alfieri 
must have become paramount, and enjoined 
upon him never to vacillate or grow weary in 
this strange mixture of love and of friendship. 



CHArXER IX. 

ROME. 

This strange intellectual passion, the meeting, 
as it were, of two long-repressed, long-solitary 
intellectual lives, austerely satisfied with itself 
and contemptuous of all baser loves, might have 
sufficed for the happiness of two such over- 
wrought natures as were at that moment Vittorio 
Alfieri and Louise d'Albany. 

But there could be no happiness for the wife 
of the Pretender, and no happiness, therefore, 
for the man who saw her the daily victim of the 
cantankerousness, the grossness and the violence 
of her drunken husband. To an imaginative 
mind, loving in things rather the ideal than the 
reality, striving forever after some poetical or 
heroic model of love and of life, trying to be at 
once a patriot out of Plutarch and a lover after 
the fashion of the Vita Nuova, there are few 
trials more exasperating than to have to see the 
real creature who for the moment embodies 
one's ideal, the creature whom one carefully 
garlands with flowers and hangs round with 



ROME. 131 

lamps, raised above all vulgar things in the 
niche in one's imagination, elbowed by brutish 
reality, bespattered with ignoble miseries. And 
this Alfieri had constantly to bear. Perhaps 
the very knowledge of the actual suffering, of 
the unjust recriminations, the cruel violence, 
the absolute fear of death, among which Louise 
d'Albany spent her life, was not so difficult for 
her lover to bear as to see her, the beautiful 
and high-minded lady of his heart, seated in 
her opera-box near the sofa where the red and 
tumid-faced Pretender lay snoring, waking up, 
as Mann describes him, only to summon his 
lackeys to assist him in a fit of drunken sick- 
ness, or to be carried, like a dead swine, with 
hanging, bloated head and powerless arms, 
down stairs to his carriage ; not so difficult to 
bear as to hear her, his Beatrice, his Laura, 
made the continual victim of her bullying hus- 
band's childish bad temper, of his foul-mouthed 
abuse, to hear it and have to sit by in silence, 
dependent upon the good graces of a besotted 
ruffian against whom Alfieri's hands must have 
continually itched. 

A little poem, poor, like all Alfieri's lyrics, 
written about this time, and complaining of 
having to see a beautiful pure rose dragged 
through ignoble filth, shows that Alfieri, like 
most poetical minds, resented the vulgar and 



132 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

the disgusting much more than he would have 
resented what one may call clean tragedy. But 
things got worse and worse, and the real tragedy 
threatened. Charles Edward had outraged and 
beaten his mistress ; older and much more pro- 
foundly degraded, he now outraged and beat his 
wife. In 1780 Sir Horace Mann reports upon 
the "cruel and indecent behavior" of which 
Mme. d'Albany was the victim. Ill treatment 
and terror were beginning to undermine her 
health, and there can be no doubt, I think, that 
the symptoms of a nervous disorder, of which 
she complained a couple of years later to Alfieri's 
bosom friend Gori, must originally have been 
produced in this unusually robust young woman 
by the horrible treatment to which she was at 
this time subjected. Mme. d'Albany, who had 
astonished the world by her resignation, appears 
to have fairly taken fright ; she wrote to her 
brother-in-law. Cardinal York, entreating him 
to protect her from her husband. The weak- 
minded, conscientious cardinal was not the man 
to take any bold step : he promised his sister-in- 
law all possible assistance if she were driven to 
extremities, but begged her to endure a little 
longer and save him the pain of a scandal. So 
the Countess of Albany, long since abandoned 
by her own kith and kin, abandoned also by her 
brother-in-law, alone in the world between a 



ROME. 133 

husband who was daily becoming more and 
more of a wild beast, and a lover who was fear- 
ful of giving any advice which might compro- 
mise her reputation or separate them forever, 
went on suffering. 

But the moment came when she could suffer 
no more. At the beginning of the winter of 
1780 the celebration of St. Andrew's Day by 
Charles Edward and his drinking companions 
was followed by a scene over which Alfieri drops 
a modest veil, calling it vaguely a violent bac- 
chanal which endangered the life of his lady. 
From the biographers of Charles Edward we 
learn that the Pretender roused his wife in the 
middle of the night with a torrent of insulting 
language which provoked her to vehement re- 
criminations ; that he beat her, committed foul 
acts upon her, and finished off with attempting 
to choke her in her bed, in which he would 
probably have succeeded had the servants not 
been waked by the Countess' screams and 
dragged Charles Edward away.* 

Alfieri, partly from an honorable reluctance 
to see his lady made the heroine of a public 
scandal, and partly, no doubt, from the more 
selfish fear lest a separation from her husband 

* I have purposely quoted, almost textually, the account 
given by Ewald, lest I should be accused of following 
Alfieri's vague version. 



134 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

might imply a separation also from her lover, 
had long persisted in advising the Countess 
against any extreme measure. Alfieri tells us 
that with the desire for freedom of speech and 
writing at the bottom of his act of self-spoliation 
in his sister's favor, there had mingled a sense 
also that by breaking all connections with Pied- 
mont, and liberating himself from all temptation 
of marrying for the sake of his family, he was, 
in a manner, securing the continuation of his 
relations with Mme. d' Albany. The Countess' 
flight from her husband, they both well knew, 
would in all probability put an end to these rela- 
tions; the Catholic Church could grant no di- 
vorce, and Charles Edward would probably 
refuse a separation ; so that the honor, nay, the 
life of the fugitive wife would be safe only in a 
convent, whence Alfieri would be excluded to- 
gether with Charles Edward. The choice was 
a hard one to make ; the choice between a life 
of peace and safety, but separated from all that 
made life dear to her, and a life consoled by the 
presence of Alfieri, but made wretched and ab- 
solutely endangered by the violence of a drunken 
maniac. But after that frightful night of St. 
Andrew no choice remained ; to remain under 
the Pretender's roof was equivalent for his wife 
either to a violent death in another such fit of 
madness, or to a lingering death from sheer mis- 



ROME. 135 

ery and daily terror. The Countess of Albany 
must leave her husband. 

To effectuate this was the work of Alfieri — 
of Alfieri, who, of all men, was most inter- 
ested to keep Mme. d' Albany in her husband's 
house ; of Alfieri, who, of all men, was the least 
fitted for any kind of underhand practices. The 
actual plot for escape was the least part of the 
business ; the conspiracy would have utterly 
miscarried, and Mme. d' Albany have been con- 
demned to a life of much worse agony, had not 
provision been made against the Pretender's cer- 
tain efforts to get his wife back. Mme. d' Albany 
may have remembered how her mother-in-law, 
Clementina Sobieska, although protected by the 
Pope, had been eventually got out of the con- 
vent whither she had escaped, and had been re- 
stored to her husband, the Pretender James ; 
she was probably aware, also, how Charles Ed- 
ward had stormed at the French Government to 
have Miss Walkenshaw sent back to him from 
the convent at Meaux. No government could 
give a man back his mistress, but it was differ- 
ent with a wife ; and both Alfieri and the Count- 
ess must have known full well that however lax 
the Grand Ducal Court might be on the subject 
of conjugal infidelity, when quietly carried on 
under the domestic roof and dignified by the 
name of serventismo, no court, no society, could 



136 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

do otherwise than virtuously resent so great 
a turpitude as a wife publicly running away by 
herself from her husband's house. It became 
necessary to win over the sympathies of those 
in power, to secure their connivance, or at all 
events their neutrality ; and the task of talking, 
flattering, wheedling, imploring, fell to Alfieri, 
whose sense of self-debasement appears to have 
been mitigated only by the knowledge that he 
was working for the good of a guiltless and mis- 
erable woman, of the woman whom he loved 
more than the whole world ; by the bitter knowl- 
edge that the success of his efforts, the libera- 
tion of his beloved, meant also the sacrifice of 
that intercourse which made the happiness of 
his life. 

Alfieri succeeded ; the Grand Duke and the 
Grand Duchess were won over. The actual 
flight alone remained to be accomplished. 

* In the first days of December, 1780, a cer- 
tain Mme. Orlandini, a half-Irish lady connected 
with the Jacobite Ormonds, was invited to 
breakfast at the palace in the Via San Sebasti- 
ano. She skilfully led the conversation into a 
discussion on needlework, and suggested that 
the Countess of Albany should go and see the 

* The chief sources for this account are Mann's de- 
spatches and the Memoires of Louis Dutens. Alfieri gives 
no details. 



ROME. 137 

last embroidery produced at the convent of Bi- 
anchette, a now long-suppressed establishment 
in the adjoining Via del Mandorlo. The Count- 
ess of Albany ordered her carriage for immedi- 
ately after breakfast, and the two ladies drove 
off, accompanied, of course, by Charles Edward, 
who never permitted his wife to go out without 
him. Near the convent gate they met a Mr. 
Gahagan, an Irish Jacobite and the official cav- 
aliere scrvente of Mme. Orlandini, who, hearing 
that they were going to pay a visit to the nuns, 
offered to accompany them. Gahagan helped 
out the Countess and Mme. Orlandini, who rap- 
idly ran up the flight of steps leading to the con- 
vent door; he then offered his arm to Charles 
Edward, whose legs were disabled by dropsy. 
Leaning on Gahagan's arm, the Pretender was 
slowly making his way up the steps, when his 
companion, looking up, suddenly exclaimed that 
the two ladies had already entered the convent, 
and that the nuns had stupidly and rudely shut 
the door in his and the Count of Albany's face. 
" They will soon have to open," answered 
Charles Edward, and began to knock violently. 
Mr. Gahagan doubtless knocked also. But no 
answer came. At length the door opened, and 
there appeared behind a grating no less a per- 
son than the Lady Abbess, who ceremoniously 
informed the Count that she was unable to let 



138 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

him in, as his wife had sought an asylum in her 
convent under the protection of her Highness 
the Grand Duchess of Tuscany. 

Sir Horace Mann says that Alfieri, who is 
not mentioned in the very circumstantial nar- 
rative of Dutens, was hanging about the con- 
vent, in order to prevent the Pretender, who 
always carried pistols in his pockets, from com- 
mitting any violence. This seems extremely 
unlikely, as the first use to which Charles Ed- 
ward would naturally have put his pistols would 
have been shooting Alfieri, for whose murder 
he immediately offered a thousand sequins. 
At any rate, raging like a maniac, the discom- 
fited husband went back to his empty house. 

It would be pretty and pathetic to insert in 
this part of my narrative a page of half-condem- 
natory condolence with Charles Edward. But 
this I find it perfectly impossible to do. Of 
course, if we call to mind Falkirk and Skye, if 
we conjure up in our fancy the Prince Charlie 
who still lived in the thoughts of Flora McDon- 
ald, there is something very frightful in this 
tragic-comic flight of the Countess of Albany : 
the slamming of that convent door in his face is 
the worst injury, the worst injustice, the worst 
ignominy reserved by fate for the last of the 
unhappy Stuarts. 

But of the Charles Edward of the '45 there 



ROME, 1 39 

remained so little in this Count of Albany that 
we have no right to consider them any longer 
as one individual, to condone the brutishness 
of the Count of Albany for the sake of the 
chivalry of Prince Charles, to degrade our con- 
ception of the young man by tacking on to it 
the just ignominy inflicted upon the old man, 
the man who had inherited his name and posi- 
tion, but scarcely his personality. Above all, 
we have no right to add to whatever reproaches 
we may think fit to shower upon the Countess 
of Albany and on Alfieri, the imaginary re- 
proach that the husband whose rights they 
were violating was the victor of Gladsmuir and 
Falkirk. 

There must always be something which 
shocks us in the behavior, however otherwise 
innocent and decorous, of a woman who runs 
away from her husband with the assistance of 
her lover; but this quality of offensiveness is 
not, in such a case as the present one, a fault 
of the woman ; it is one of her undeserved mis- 
fortunes, as much as is the bad treatment, the 
solitude, the temptation, to which she has been 
subjected. The evil practice of the world, its 
folly and wickedness in permitting that a girl 
like Louise of Stolberg should be married to a 
man like Charles Edward, its injustice and 
cruelty in forbidding the legal breaking of such 



I40 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

an unrighteous contract ; the evil practice of 
the world which condemned the Countess of 
Albany to be for so much of her life an un- 
happy woman, also condemned her to be in 
some of her actions a woman deserving of 
blame. We shall see further on how, in the 
attempt to work out their happiness in despite 
of the evil world in which they lived, the 
Countess and Alfieri, infinitely intellectually 
and morally superior to many of us whom cir- 
cumstances permit to live blameless and com- 
fortable, were splashed with the mud of un- 
righteousness, which was foreign to their 
nature, and remained spotted in the eyes of 
posterity. 

Charles Edward did what he had done once 
before in his life : he applied to the Govern- 
ment to put him again in possession of the 
woman whom he had victimized ; but as the 
French Government had refused to recognize 
his claims over his fugitive mistress, so the 
Government of the Grand Duke of Tuscany 
now refused to give him back his fugitive wife. 
The Countess of Albany had naturally taken no 
clothes with her in her flight ; and she pres- 
ently sent a maid to the palace in Via San 
Sebastiano to fetch such things as she might 
require. But Charles Edward would not per- 
mit a single one of her effects to be touched ; if 



ROME. 141 

she wanted her clothes and trinkets, she might 
come and fetch them herself. However, after 
a few days, a message came from the Pope, 
ordering the Pretender to supply his wife with 
whatever she might require ; a threat to sus- 
pend the pension was probably expressed or 
implied, for Charles Edward immediately 
obeyed. 

Meanwhile the Countess of Albany was anx- 
iously awaiting at the convent of the Bianchette 
a decision from her brother-in-law, to whom she 
had written immediately after her flight. Those 
first days must have been painfully unquiet. 
What if the Tuscan Court should listen to the 
Count of Albany's entreaties } What if Cardi- 
nal York should take part with his brother.? 
Return to the house of her husband would be 
death or worse than death. Cardinal York 
answered immediately : a long, kind, rather 
weak-minded letter, the ideal letter of a well- 
intentioned, rather silly priest, in curious Anglo- 
Roman French. He informed her that for some 
time past he had expected to hear of her flight 
from her husband ; he protested that he had 
had no hand in her unhappy marriage, and 
begged her to believe that it had been out of 
his power to protect her. He had informed the 
Pope of the whole affair, and with his Holiness' 
approval had prepared for his sister-in-law a 



142 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

temporary asylum in the Ursuline convent in 
Rome, whither he invited her to remove as soon 
as possible. In January, 1781, the Countess of 
Albany, accompanied by a Mme. de Marzan, 
who appears to have formed part of her house- 
hold, and two maids, started for Rome ; but 
such had been the threats of Charles Edward 
and his ravings to get his wife back, that Alfieri 
and Gahagan, armed and dressed as servants, 
accompanied the carriage a considerable part of 
its way. The Pretender, we must remember, 
had offered a thousand sequins to any one who 
would kill Alfieri ; and even in that humdrum 
late eighteenth century a man of position might 
easily hire a couple of ruffians to waylay a car- 
riage and kidnap a woman. 

The Countess of Albany was installed in the 
Ursuline convent in Via Vittoria, a street near 
the Piazza di Spagna. A gloomy family mem- 
ory hung about the place : it had been the asy- 
lum of Clementina Sobieska when she had fled 
from the elder Pretender, as Louise d' Albany 
had fled from the younger. But the wife of 
Charles Edward was in a very different mood 
from the wife of James III. ; and it is probable 
that, despite the many charms of the convent 
and the excellent manners of its aristocratic in- 
mates, upon which Cardinal York had laid great 
store, the Countess, with her heart full of the 



ROME. 143 

thought of Alfieri, was not at all inclined to 
give her pious brother-in-law the satisfaction, 
which he apparently expected, of developing a 
sudden vocation for Heaven. 

She had left Florence at the end of the year; 
in the spring she saw Alfieri again. The quiet 
work which had seemed so natural and easy, 
while he was sure of seeing his lady every day, 
had become quite impossible to him. He felt 
that he ought to remain in Florence, that he 
ought not to follow her to Rome. But Flor- 
ence had become insufferable to him ; and he 
determined to remove to Naples, because to get 
to Naples it was necessary to pass through 
Rome. The melancholy, barren approach to 
the Eternal City, which, three years before, had 
inspired Alfieri with nothing but melancholy 
and disgust, now seemed to him a sort of earthly 
paradise ; and Rome, which he hated, as the 
most delightful of places. He hurried to the 
Ursuline convent and was admitted to speak to 
the Countess of Albany. " I saw her, " he wrote 
many years later, "but (O God! my heart 
seems to break at the mere recollection) I saw 
her a prisoner behind a grating ; less tormented 
than in Florence, but yet not less unhappy. 
We were separated, and who could tell how long 
our separation might not last.^^ But, while cry- 
ing, I tried to console myself with the thought 



144 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

that she might at least recover her health, that 
she would breathe freely and sleep peacefully, no 
longer trembling at every moment before the 
indivisible shadow of her drunken husband ; 
that she might, in short, live. " 



CHAPTER X. 

ANTIGONE. 

About three months after the Countess of 
Albany's flight from her husband, the Pope 
granted her permission to leave the Ursuline 
convent ; and her brother-in-law, Cardinal York, 
offered her hospitality in his magnificent palace 
of the Cancelleria. Alfieri was at Naples when 
he received this news, riding gloomily along 
the sea-shore, weeping profusely (for we must 
remember that to an Italian, especially of the 
eighteenth century, there is no incongruity in a 
would-be ancient Roman shedding love-sick 
tears), unable to give his attention to work, 
living, as he expresses it, on the coming in and 
going out of the post. '' I wished to return to 
Rome, " he writes, "and at the same time I felt 
very keenly that I ought not to do it yet. The 
struggles between love and duty which take 
place in an honorable and tender heart are the 
most terrible and mortal pain that a man can 
suffer. I delayed throughout April, and I de- 
termined to drag on through May ; but on the 



146 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

1 2th May I found myself, I scarcely know how, 
back in Rome. " 

Alfieri found the Countess of Albany estab- 
lished in the palace of the Cancelleria, the 
mistress of the establishment, for her brother- 
in-law was living in his episcopal town of 
Frascati. They were free to see each other as 
much as they chose, to love each other as much 
as they would ; for the Cardinal and the priestly 
circles seem to have gone completely to sleep 
in the presence of this critical situation ; and 
the habits of Roman society, which were even 
a shade worse than those of Florence, were not 
such as to give umbrage to the lovers. 

But those years during which they had 
loved under the vigilant jealousy of Charles 
Edward had apparently fostered a love which 
was accustomed and satisfied with being only a 
more passionate kind of friendship ; the indom- 
itable power of resistance to himself, the pas- 
sion for realizing in himself some heroic attitude 
which he admired, and the almost furious desire 
to reverse completely his former habits of life, 
kept Alfieri up to the point of a platonic con- 
nection ; and the Countess of Albany, intel- 
lectual, cold, passive, easily moulded by a more 
vehement nature, loved Alfieri much more with 
the head than with the heart, and loved in him 
just that which made him prefer that they 



ANTIGONE. 147 

should meet and love as austerely as Petrarch 
and Laura. The fact was, I believe, that the 
Countess of Albany had much more mind than 
personality, and that she was therefore mere 
wax in the hands of a man who had become so 
exclusively and violently intellectual as Alfieri ; 
she had seen too much of the coarse realities of 
life, of the brutal giving way to sensual im- 
pulse : the heroic, the ideal, nay, the deliber- 
ately made-up, the artificial, had a charm for 
her. Be this as it may, the Countess and Al- 
fieri continued, in the opinion of all contempo- 
raries, and according to the assurance of Alfieri 
himself, whose cynicism and truthfulness are 
equal, on the same footing as in Florence. 

And these months in Rome seem to have 
been the happiest months of Alfieri's life, the 
happiest, probably, of the life of the Countess 
of Albany. Alfieri hired the Villa Strozzi, on 
the Esquiline, a small palace built by one of 
Michel Angelo's pupils, and for which, includ- 
ing the use of furniture, stables and garden, he 
paid the now incredibly small sum of ten scudi 
a month, about two pounds of our money. Per- 
mitting himself only two coats, the black one 
for the evening and the famous blue one for 
ordinary occasions, and limiting his dinner to 
one dish of meat and vegetables, without wine 
or coffee, Alfieri contrived to make the com- 



148 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

paratively small pension paid to him by his 
sister go almost as far as had the fine fortune 
of which he had despoiled himself. He spent 
lavishly on books and more lavishly on horses, — 
on horses which, according to his own account, 
were his third passion, coming only after his 
love for Mme. d' Albany, and sometimes usurp- 
ing the place of his love of literary glory. 

The mania for systematic division of his 
time, the invincible tendency to routine, which 
follows in most Italians after the disorder and 
wastefulness of youth, had already got the better 
of Alfieri. He had, almost at the moment 
when the passion for literature first disclosed 
itself, made up his mind to write a definite 
number of tragedies, first twelve, then fourteen, 
and no more ; and to devote a certain number 
of years to the elaborate process of first con- 
structing them mentally, then of writing them 
full length in prose, and finally of turning this 
prose into verse ; and he was later to devise a 
corresponding plan of writing an equally fixed 
number of comedies and satires in an equally 
fixed number of years, after which, as we have 
seen, he was to give up his thoughts, having 
attained the age of forty-five, to preparing for 
death. 

This routine is a national characteristic, and 
absorbs many an Italian, turning all the poetry 



ANTIGONE. ' 149 

of his nature to prose, with a kind of dreadful 
inevitableness ; but Alfieri did not merely sub- 
mit to routine : he enjoyed it, he devised and 
carried it out with all the ferocity of his nature. 
To this man, who cared so much for the figure 
he cut, and so little for all the things which sur- 
rounded him, a life reduced to absolute monot- 
ony of grinding work was almost an object of 
aesthetic pleasure, almost an object of sensual 
delight; he enjoyed a dead level, an endless 
w^hitewashed wall, as much as other men, and 
especially other poets, enjoy the ups and downs, 
the irregularities and mottled colors of existence. 
So Alfieri arranged for himself in his house 
near Santa Maria Maggiore what to him was a 
life of exquisite delightfulness. 

He spent the whole early morning reading 
the Latin and Italian classics, and grinding 
away at his tragedies, which, after repeated 
sketching out, repeated writing out in prose, 
were now going through the most elaborate 
process of writing, re-writing, revising and re- 
revising in verse. Then, before resuming his 
solitary studies in the afternoon, he would have 
one of his many horses saddled, and ride about 
in the desolate tracts of the town, which in 
papal times extended from Santa Maria Mag- 
giore to the Porta Pia, the Porta San Lorenzo, 
and St. John Lateran : miles of former villa 



ISO COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

gardens, with quincunxes and flower-bEds, cut 
up for cabbage-growing, wide, open spaces 
where the wall of a temple, the arch of an 
aqueduct, rose crowned with wall-flower and 
weeds out of the rank grass, the briars and 
nettles, the heaps of broken masonry and plas- 
ter, among which shone beneath the darting 
lizards, scraps of vermilion wall-fresco, the chips 
of purple porphyry or dark-green serpentine ; 
long avenues of trees early sere, closed in by 
arum-fringed walls, or by ditches where the 
withered reeds creaked beneath the festoons of 
clematis and wild vine ; solemn and solitary 
wildernesses within the city walls, where the 
silence was broken only by the lowing of the 
herds driven along by the shaggy herdsman on 
his shaggy horse, by the long-drawn, guttural 
chant of the carter stretched on the top of his 
cart, and the jingle of his horse's bells ; places 
inaccessible to the present, a border-land of 
the past, and which, as Alfieri says, thinking of 
those many times when he must have reined in 
his horse, and vaguely and wistfully looked out 
on to the green desolation islanded with ruins 
and traversed by the vast procession of the 
aqueducts, invited one to meditate, and cry, and 
be a poet. And sometimes — we know it from 
the sonnets to his horse Fido, who had, Alfieri 
tells us, carried the beloved burden of his lady 



AA'TIGONE. 151 

— Alfieri did not ride out alone. One of the 
horses of the Villa Strozzi was saddled for the 
Countess of Albany : and this strange pair of 
platonic lovers rode forth together among the 
ruins, the wife of Charles Edward listening, 
with something more than mere abstract inter- 
est, to Alfieri's fiercest contemptuous tirades 
against the tyranny of soldiers and priests, the 
tyranny of sloth and lust which had turned 
these spots into a wilderness, and which had 
left the world, as Alfieri always felt, and a man 
not unlike Alfieri in savage and destructive 
austerity, St. Just, was later to say, empty since 
the days of the Romans. 

Towards dusk Alfieri put by his books, and 
descended through the twilit streets of the up- 
per city — where the troops of red and yellow 
and blue seminarists, and black and brown 
monks, passed by like ants, homeward bound 
after their evening walk — into the busier parts 
of Rome, and crossing the Corso filled with 
painted and gilded coaches, and making his 
way through the many squares where the peo- 
ple gathered round the lemonade booths near 
the fountain or the obelisk, through the tortu- 
ous back streets filled with the noise of the an- 
vils and hammers of the locksmiths and nailers 
behind the Pantheon, made his way towards the 
palace, grand and prim in its architecture of 



152 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

Bramants, of the Cancelleria, perhaps not with- 
out thinking that in the big square before its 
windows, where the vegetable carts were un- 
loaded every morning, and the quacks and dent- 
ists and peddlers bawled all day, a man as 
strange, as wayward and impatient of tyranny 
as himself, Giordano Bruno, had been burned 
two centuries before by Cardinal York's prede- 
cessor in that big palace of the Cancelleria. 
Fortunately there was no Cardinal York in the 
Cancelleria, or at least only rarely ; but instead 
only the beautiful blonde woman with the 
dark ha-zel eyes, whom Alfieri spoke of as his 
"lady," and, somewhat later, as "the sweet half 
of himself," and in whose speech Alfieri was 
never Alfieri, or Vittorio, or the Count, but 
merely "the poet," so completely had these 
strange, self-modelling, unconsciously-attitudin- 
izing lovers arrayed themselves and their love 
according to the pattern of Dante and Petrarch. 

To the Countess, we may be sure, Alfieri 
never failed to give a most elaborate* account of 
his day's work, nor to read to her whatever 
scenes of his plays he had blocked out in prose 
or worked up in verse. By eleven o'clock, he 
tells us, he was always back in his solitary little 
villa on the Esquiline. 

But this, although it is probably correct with 
regard to his visits to Mme. d'Albany, with 



ANTIGONE. 153 

whom consideration for gossip prevented his 
staying much after ten at night, must not be 
taken as the invariable rule; forAlfieri, devoted 
as he was to his lady, by no means neglected 
other society. He was finishing his allotted 
number of tragedies, and as the solemn moment 
of publication approached, he began to be tor- 
mented with that same desire to display his 
work to others, to hear their praises even if 
false, to understand their opinion even if unfav- 
orable, which came, by gusts, as one of the pas- 
sions of his life. Rome was at that time, like 
every Italian town, full of literary academies, 
conventicles of very small intellectual fry meet- 
ing in private drawing-rooms or at coffee-houses, 
and swayed by the overlordship of the famous 
Arcadia, which had now sunk into being a huge 
club to which every creature who scribbled, or 
daubed, or strummed, or had a coach and pair, or 
a bad tongue, or a pretty face, or a title, belonged 
without further claims. There were also several 
houses of women who affected intelligence or 
culture, having no claims to beauty or fashion ; 
and foremost among these, but differing from 
them by the real originality and culture of the 
lady of the house, the charm of her young 
daughter, and the superior quality of the con- 
versation and music to be enjoyed there, was the 
house of a Sic!:nora Maria Pizzelli, of all women 



154 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

in Rome the one to whom, after the Countess of 
Albany, Alfieri showed himself most assiduous. 
In her house and in many others Alfieri began to 
give almost public readings of his plays ; trying 
to persuade himself that his object in so doing 
was to judge, from the expression of face and 
even more from the restlessness or quiesence of 
his listeners on their chairs, how his work might 
affect the mixed audience of a theatre ; but ad- 
mitting in his heart of hearts that the old desire 
to be remarked had as much to do with these 
exhibitions as with the six-horse gallops which 
used to astonish the people of Turin and Flor- 
ence. 

But something better soon offered itself. The 
Duke Grimaldi had had a small theatre con- 
structed in the Spanish palace, his residence as 
Ambassador from the Catholic King, and a small 
company of high-born amateurs had been play- 
ing in it translations of French comedies and 
tragedies. To these ladies and gentlemen Al- 
fieri offered his Antigone, which was accepted 
with fervor. The beautiful and majestic Duch- 
ess of Zagarolo was to act the part of the heroine ; 
her brother and sister-in-law, the Duke and 
Duchess of Ceri, respectively, the parts of Hae- 
mon and of Argia, while the character of Creon, 
the villain of the piece, was reserved for Alfieri 
himself. The performance of Antigone was a 



ANTIGONE, 155 

great solemnity. The magnificent rooms of the 
Spanish Embassy were crowded with the fash- 
ionable world of Rome, which, in the year 1782, 
included priests and princes of the Church quite 
as much as painted ladies and powdered cavaliers. 
A contemporary diary, kept by the page of the 
Princess Colonna, a certain Abate Benedetti, 
enables us to form some notion of the assembly. 
Foremost among the ladies were the two rival 
beauties, equally famous for their conquests in 
the ecclesiastical as well as the secular nobility, 
the Princess Santacroceandthe Princess Altieri, 
vieing with each other in the magnificence of 
their diamonds and of their lace, and each upon 
the arm of a prince of the Church who had the 
honor of \)^\Vi^\i^x ox\^o^Qy.cavalie7'e servente ; 
the Princess Altieri led in by Cardinal Giovan 
Francesco Albani, the very gallant and art-loving 
nephew of Winckelmann's Cardinal Alessandro ; 
the Princess Santacroce escorted by the French 
Ambassador Cardinal de Bernis, the amiable 
society rhymester of Mme. de Pompadour, whom 
Frederick the Great had surnamed Babet la 
boiiqtietiere. In the front row sat the wife of 
the Senator Rezzonico, who, in virtue of being 
the niece of the late Pope Clement XIIL, affected 
an almost royal pomp, and by her side sat the 
wittiest and most literary of the sacred college, 
the still very flirtatious old Cardinal Gerdil. The 



156 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

hall was nearly full when the stir in the crowd, 
and the general looking in one direction, an- 
nounced the arrival of a guest who excited un- 
wonted attention. A young woman, who scarcely 
looked her full age of thirty, small, slender, very 
simply and elegantly dressed, with something 
still girlish in her small, irregular features and 
complexion of northern brilliancy, was conducted 
along the gangway between the rows of chairs, 
and, as if she were the queen of the entertain- 
ment, solemnly installed by the side of the Prin- 
cess Rezzonico in the first row. Was it because 
her husband had called himself King of England, 
or because her lover was the author of the play 
about to be performed } Be it as it may, the 
Countess of Albany was the object of universal 
curiosity, and the emotion which she displayed 
during the play was a second and perhaps more 
interesting performance for the scandal-loving 
Romans. 

While the ghosts of these long-dead men and 
women, ladies in voluminous brocaded skirts 
and diamond-covered bosoms, bursting out of 
the lace and jewels of their stiff bodices, cardi- 
nals in trailing scarlet robes and bishops with 
well-powdered hair contrasting curiously with 
their Dominican or Franciscan dress, Roman 
nobles all in the strange old-world costumes, 



ANTIGONE. 157 

with ruffs and trunk hose and emblazoned man- 
tles, of the Pope's household and of the military 
orde-rs of Malta and Calatrava, secular dandies 
in elaborately-embroidered silk coats and waist- 
coats, ecclesiastical dandies to the full as dapper 
with their heavy lace, and abundant fob jewels 
and inevitable two watches on the sober black 
of their clothes ; — whil'e these ghosts whom we 
have evoked in all their finery (long since gone 
to the bric-d-h'ac shops) to fill the theatre-hall 
of the Spanish palace, sit and listen to the sym- 
phony which Cimarosa himself has written for 
Antigone^ sit and watch the magnificent Duchess 
of Zagarolo, dressed as Antigone in hoop and 
stomacher and piled-up, feathered hair, and the 
red-haired, eccentric Piedmontese Count, the 
d'Albany's lover, bellowing the anger of Creon; 
let us try and sum up what the tragedies of Al- 
fieri are for us people of to-day, and what they 
must have been for those people of a hundred 
years ago. 

While scribbling for mere pastime at his 
earliest play, Alfieri had felt his mind illum- 
ined by a sort of double revelation : he would 
make his name immortal and he would create a 
new kind of tragedy. These two halves of a 
proposition, of which he appears never to have 
entertained a single moment's doubt, had origin- 
ated at the same time and developed in close 



158 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

connection : that he could be otherwise than an 
innovator was as inconceivable to Alfieri as 
that he could be otherwise than a genius, al- 
though, in reality, he was as far from being the 
one as from being the other. The fact was that 
Alfieri felt in himself the power of inventing a 
style and of producing works which should an- 
swer to the requirements of his own nature : 
considering himself as the sole audience, he 
considered himself as the unique playwright. 
Excessively limited in his mental vision, and 
excessively strong in his mental muscle, it was 
with his works as with his life : the ideal was 
so comparatively within reach, and the will was 
so powerful, that one feels certain that he 
nearly always succeeded in behaving in the 
way in which he approved, and in writing in 
the style which he admired. And the most 
extraordinary part of the coincidence was, that 
as he happened to live in a time and country 
which had entirely neglected the tragic stage, 
and consequently had no habits or aspirations 
connected with it, his own desires with refer- 
ence to Italian tragedy preceded those of his 
fellow-countrymen, his own ideal was thrust 
upon them before they well knew where they 
were ; and his own nature and likings became 
the sole standard by which he measured his 
works, his own satisfaction the only criterion 
by which they could be judged. 



ANTIGONE. 159 

In order, therefore, to understand the nature 
of Alfieri's plays, it is necessary, first of all, to 
understand what were Alfieri's innate likings 
and dislikings in the domain of the drama. 
Before all other things, Alfieri was not a poet : 
he lacked all, or very nearly all, the faculties 
which are really poetical. To begin with the 
more gross and external ones, he had no in- 
stinct for, no pleasure in, metrical arrange- 
ments for their own sake ; he did not think nor 
invent in verse, ideas did not come to him on 
the wave of metre ; he thought out, he elabo- 
rately finished, every sentence in prose, and 
then translated that prose into verse, as he 
might have translated (and in some instances 
actually did translate) from a French version 
into an Italian one. Moreover he was, to a 
degree which would have been surprising even 
in a prose writer, deficient in that which consti- 
tutes the intellectual essence of poetry as metre 
constitutes its material externality ; in that ten- 
dency to see things surrounded by, disguised 
in, a swarm, a masquerade of associated ideas ; 
deficient in the power of suggesting images, of 
conceiving figures of speech ; in fancy, imagin- 
ation, in the metaphorical faculty, or whatever 
else we may choose to call it. Nor did he per- 
ceive or describe visible things, visible effects, 
in their own unmetaphorical shapes and colors : 



l60 COl/NTESS OF ALBANY. 

not a line of description, not an adjective can 
be found in his works except such as may be 
absolutely indispensable for topographical or 
similar intelligibility ; Alfieri obviously cared 
as little for beautiful sights as for beautiful 
sound. This being the case, everything that 
we might call distinctly poetical, all those 
things which are precious to us in Shakespeare, 
or Marlowe, dr Webster, in Goethe or Schiller, 
nay, even, occurring at intervals, in Racine 
himself, at least as much as mere psychology 
or oratory or pathos, appeared to Alfieri in the 
light of mere meretricious gewgaws, which took 
away from the interest of dramatic action with- 
out affording him any satisfaction in return. 
As it was with metre and metaphor and de- 
scription, so it was also with the indefinable 
something which we call lyric quality : the 
something which sings to our soul, and which 
sends a thrill of delight through our nerves or 
a gust of emotion across our nature in the same 
direct way as do the notes of certain voices, 
the phrases of certain pieces of music : instan- 
taneously, unreasoningly and unerringly. Of 
this Alfieri had little, so little that we may also 
say that he had nothing ; the presence of this 
quality being evidently unnoticed by him and 
unappreciated. So much for the absolutely 
poetical qualities. Of what I may call the prose 



ANTIGONE. l6l 

qualities of a playwright, only a certain number 
appealed to Alfieri, and only a certain number 
were possessed by him. In a time when the 
novel was beginning to become a psychological 
study more minute than any stage play could 
ever be, Alfieri was only very moderately in- 
terested in the subtle analysis or representation 
of character and state of mind ; the fine touches 
which bring home a person or a situation did 
not attract his attention ; nor was he troubled 
by considerations concerning the probability of 
a given word or words being spoken at a par- 
ticular moment and by a particular man or 
woman ; realism had no meaning for him. As 
it was with intellectual conception, so was it also 
with instructive sympathy : Alfieri never subtly 
analyzed the anatomy of individual nature, nor 
did he unsconsciously mimic its action and tones ; 
what most of us mean by pathos did not appeal to 
him. Neither metrical nor imaginative pleas- 
urableness, nor descriptive charm, nor lyric 
poignancy, nor psychological analysis or inten- 
tion entered, therefore, into Alfieri's conception 
of a desirable tragedy, any more than any of 
these things fell within the range of his special 
talents ; for we must always bear in mind that 
with this man, whose feelings and desires were 
in such constant action and reaction, with this 
man whose will imposed his intellectual notions 
6 



1 62 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 

on his feelings, and his emotional tendencies on 
his thoughts, the thing which he enjoys is al- 
ways as the concave to the convex of the thing 
which he produces. But although Alfieri was 
not a poet, and was not even a potential novel 
writer, he was, in a sense, essentially a drama- 
tist ; though even here we must distinguish 
and diminish. Alfieri was not a man who cared 
for rapid action or for intricate plot : he never 
felt the smallest inclination to violate the old 
traditions of the pseudo-classic stage by those 
thrilling scenes or sights which had to be de- 
scribed and not shown, nor by those complica- 
tions of interest which require years for an ac- 
tion instead of the orthodox twenty-four hours. 
He was perfectly satisfied with the no-place, 
no-where — with the vague temple, or palace 
hall, or public square, where, as in the country 
of the abstract, the action of pseudo-classic trag- 
edy always takes place, or, more properly speak- 
ing, the talking of pseudo-classic tragedy 
always goes on ; he was perfectly satisfied 
with sending in a servant or a messenger to 
inform the public of a murder or suicide com- 
mitted behind the scenes ; he was perfectly 
satisfied with taking up a story, so to speak, at 
the eleventh hour, without tracing it to its 
original causes or developing it through its 
various phases. In such matters Alfieri was 



ANTIGONE, 163 

as undramatic as Corneille or Racine. Never- 
theless Alfieri had a distinct dramatic sense : an 
intense poseur himself, enjoying nothing so 
much as working himself up to produce a given 
effect upon his own mind or upon others, he had 
an extraordinary instinct for the theatrical, for 
the moral attitude which may be struck so as to 
be effective, and for the arrangement of subor- 
dinate parts so that this attitude surprise and 
move the audience. The moral attitude, the 
psychological gesture, which thus became the 
main interest of Alfieri's plays, was, as might be 
expected from such a man, nearly always his 
own moral attitude, his own psychological 
gesture ; he himself, his uncompromising, un- 
hesitating, unflinching, curt and emphatic na- 
ture, is always the hero or heroine of the play, 
however much the situation, the incidents, the 
other characteristics may vary. Antigone is 
generous and tender, Creon is inhuman in all 
save paternal feeling, Saul is a suspicious mad- 
man, Agamemnon a just and confiding hero, 
Clytaemnestra is sinful and self-sophisticating, 
Virginia pure and open-minded ; yet all these 
different people, despite all their differences, 
speak and act as Alfieri would speak and act, 
could he, without losing his peculiar character- 
istics, adopt for the moment vices or virtues 
which would become quite secondary matters 



1 64 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

by the side of his essential qualities of pride, 
narrowness, decision, violence and self-impor- 
tance. Whether he paint his face into a smile 
or a scowl, whether he put on the blond wig of 
innocence or the black wig of villainy, the 
man's movement and gesture, the tone of his 
voice, the accent of his words, the length of his 
sentences, are always the same : so much so 
that in one play there may be two or three 
Alfieris, good and bad, Alfieris turned perfectly 
virtuous or perfectly vicious ; but anything 
that is not an Alfieri in some tolerably trans- 
parent disguise is sure to be a puppet, a lay 
figure with as few joints as possible, just able 
to stretch out its arms and clap them to its sides, 
but dangling suspended between heaven and 
earth. 

The attitude and the gesture, which are the 
things for whose sake the play exists, are, as I 
have said, the attitude and gesture of Alfieri. 
But the moral attitude and gesture of Alfieri 
happened to be just those which were rarest in 
the eighteenth century in all countries, and 
more especially rare in Italy ; and they were 
the moral attitude and gesture which the 
eighteenth century absolutely required to be- 
come the nineteenth, and which the Italy of 
Peter Leopold and Pius VI. and Metastasio and 
Goldoni absolutely required to become the 



ANTIGONE. 165 

Italy of Mazzini and Garibaldi, the Italy of 
Foscolo and Leopardi ; they were the attitude 
and the gesture of single-mindedness, haughti- 
ness, indifference to one's own comfort and 
one's neighbors' opinion, the attitude and 
gesture of manliness, of strength, if you will, of 
heroism. 

To have written tragedies whose whole value 
depended upon the striking exhibition of these 
qualities ; and to have made this exhibition in- 
teresting, nay, fascinating to the very people, to 
the amiable, humane, indifferent, lying, feeble- 
spirited Italians of the latter eighteenth century, 
till these very men were ashamed of what they 
had hitherto been ; to stamp the new generation 
with the clear-cut die of his own strong charac- 
ter ; this was the reality of the mission which 
Alfieri had felt within himself; a reality which 
will be remembered when his plays shall have 
long ceased to be acted, and shall long have 
ceased to be read. Alfieri imagined himself to 
be a great poetic genius and a great dramatic 
innovator ; he scorned with loathing the works 
of Corneille, of Racine and of Voltaire, all im- 
measurably more valuable as poetry and drama 
than his ov/n ; he hated the works of Metastasio, 
a poet and playwright by 'the divine right of 
genius ; he refused to read Shakespeare, lest 
Shakespeare should spoil the perfection of his 



l66 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

own conceptions. He slaved for months and 
years perfecting each of his plays, recasting the 
action, and curtailing the dialogue and polishing 
the verse ; yet the action was always heavy, the 
dialogue unnatural to the last degree, the verse 
unpoetical. But all this extraordinary self-suf- 
ficiency was not a delusion, all this extraordi- 
nary labor was not a waste ; Alfieri, who never 
had a single poetical thought nor a single art- 
revolutionizing notion, was yet a great genius 
and a great innovator, inasmuch as he first 
moulded in his own image the Italian patriot of 
the nineteenth century. His use consisted in 
his mere existence among men so different from 
himself ; and his dramas, his elaborately con- 
structed and curtailed and corrected dramas, 
were, so to speak, a system of mirrors by which 
the image of this strange, new-fangled personal- 
ity might be flashed everywhere into the souls of 
his contemporaries. To perceive the moral atti- 
tude and gesture specially characteristic of him- 
self, to artificially correct and improve and isolate 
them in his own reality, and then to multiply 
their likeness for all the world, to know himself 
to be Alfieri, to make himself up as Alfieri, and 
to write plays whereof the heroes and heroines 
were mere repetitions of Alfieri ; such was the 
mission of this powerful and spontaneous na- 
ture, of this self-conscious and self-manipulating 
posezir. 



ANTIGONE. 167 

The success of that performance of Antigojie 
on the amateur stage in the Spanish palace was 
very great. A young man, half lay, half ecclesi- 
astic, a dubious sort of poet, secretary, factotum, 
accustomed to write not the most sincere poetry, 
and to execute, perhaps, not the most creditable 
errands, of the Pope's dubious nephew, Duke 
Braschi — a young man named Vincenzo Monti, 
was present at this performance, or one of the 
succeeding ones ; and from that moment became 
the author of the revolutionary tragedy of A^ds- 
todeino, the potential author of that famous ode 
on the battle of Marengo, one of the forerunners 
of new Italy. Nay, even when, some few 
months later, there died at Vienna the old Abate 
Metastasio, and his death brought home to a 
rather forgetful world what a poet and what a 
dramatist that old Metastasio had been ; even 
then, an intimate friend of the dead man, a 
worldly priest, a quasi prelate, the Abate Ta- 
ruffi, could find no better winding up for the fu- 
neral oration, delivered before all the pedants and 
prigs and fops and spies of pontifical Rome as- 
sembled in the rooms of the Arcadian academy, 
than to point to Count Vittorio Alfieri, and 
prophesy that Metastasio had found a successor 
greater than himself. 



CHAPTER XI. 

SEPARATION. 

Alfieri and the Countess were happy, happier, 
perhaps, than at any other time of their Hves ; 
but this happiness had to be paid for. The false 
position in which, however faultlessly, they were 
placed, the illegitimate affection in which, how- 
ever blamelessly, they were indulging ; these 
things, offensive to social institutions, although 
in no manner wrong in themselves, had produced 
their fruit of humiliation, nay, of degradation. 
Fate is more of a conservative than we are apt to 
think ; it resents the efforts of any individual, be 
he as blameless as possible, to resist for his own 
comfort and satisfaction the uncomfortable and 
unsatisfactory arrangements of the world ; it pun- 
ishes the man who seeks to elude an un j ust law by 
condemning him' to the same moral police depot, 
to the same moral prison-food, as the villain who 
has eluded the holiest law that was ever framed ; 
and Fate, therefore, soiled the poetic passion of 
Alfieri and his lady by forcing it to the base 
practices of any illicit love. The manner in 



SEPARATION. 1 69 

which Fate executes these summary lynchings 
of people's honor could not usually be more in- 
genious ; there seems to be a special arrange- 
ment by which offenders are punished in their 
most sensitive part. The punishment of Alfieri 
and of Mme. d' Albany for refusing to sacrifice 
their happiness to the proprieties of a society 
which married girls of nineteen to drunkards 
whom they had never seen, but which would not 
hear of divorce ; this punishment, falling directly 
only upon the man, but probably just as heavy 
upon the woman who witnessed the humiliation 
of the person whom she most loved and respect- 
ed, consisted in turning Alfieri, the man who 
was training Italy to be self-respecting, truthful, 
unflinching, into a toady, a liar and an intriguer. 
The Countess of Albany, living in the palace 
of her brother-in-law. Cardinal York, and under 
the special protection of the Pope, was entirely 
dependent on the good pleasure of the priestly 
bureaucracy of the Rome of Pius VI., that is to 
say, of about the most contemptible and vilest 
set of fools and hypocrites and sinners that can 
well be conceived ; the Papacy, just before the 
Revolution, had become one of the most corrupt 
of the many corrupt governments of the day. 
Cardinal York himself was a weak and silly, 
but honest and kind-hearted man ; but Cardinal 
York was entirely swayed by the prelates and 



I/O COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

priests and priestlets and semi-priestly, semi-lay 
nondescripts among whom he lived. He was 
responsible for the honor of the Countess of 
Albany, that is to say, of her husband and his 
brother ; and the honor of the Countess of Al- 
bany depended exactly upon the remarks which 
the most depraved and hypocritical clergy in 
Europe, the people who did or abetted all the 
dirty work of Pius VI . and his sacred college, 
chose to make or not to make about her 
conduct. 

Such were the persons upon whom depended 
the liberty and happiness of Alfieri's lady, the 
possibility of that high-flown platonic inter- 
course which constituted Louise d'Albany's 
whole happiness and Alfieri's strongest incent- 
ive to glory ; a word from them could exile 
Alfieri and lock the Countess up in a convent. 
The consequence of this state of things is hu- 
miliating to relate, since it shows to what base- 
ness the most high-minded among us may be 
force to degrade themselves. Already, during 
those few days' sojourn in Rome, before his 
stay in Naples and Mme. d'Albany's release 
from the Ursuline convent, Alfieri had spent his 
time running about flattering and wheedling 
the powers in command (that is to say, the cor- 
rupt ministers of the Papacy and their retinue 
of minions and spies), in order to obtain leave 



SEPARATION. I/I 

to inhabit the same city as his beloved and to 
see her from time to time ; doing everything, 
and stooping to everything, he tells us, in order 
to be tolerated by those priests and priestlets 
whom he abhorred and despised from the 
bottom of his heart. " After so many frenzies 
and efforts to make myself a free man, " he 
writes in his autobiography, " I found myself 
suddenly transformed into a man paying calls, 
and making bows and fine speeches in Rome, 
exactly like a candidate on promotion in prel- 
atedom. " At this price of bitter humiliation, 
nay, of something more real than mere humilia- 
tion, Alfieri bought the privilege of frequenting 
the palace of Cardinal York. But it was a privi- 
lege for which you could not pay once and for 
all ; its price was a blackmail of humbugging, 
wheedling and dirt-eating. ' 

Alfieri hated and despised all sovereigns and 
all priests ; and if there were a sovereign and a 
priest whom he despised and hated more than 
the rest, it was the then reigning Pius VI., a 
vain, avaricious, weak-minded man, stickling not 
in the least at humiliating Catholicism before 
any one who asked him to do it, by no means 
clean-handed in his efforts to enrich his family, 
without courage, or fidelity to his promise ; a 
man whose miserable end as the brutally- 
treated captive of the French Republic has not 



1/2 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

been sufficient to raise to the dignity of a 
martyr. 

Of this Pope Pius VI. did Alfieri crave an 
audience, and to him did he offer the dedication 
of one of his plays ; nay, the man who had sac- 
rificed his fortune in order to free himself from 
the comparatively clean-handed despotism of 
Sardinia, who had stubbornly refused to be pre- 
sented to Frederick the Great and Catherine 
II., who had declined making Metastasio's 
acquaintance on account of a too deferential 
bow which he had seen the old poet make to 
Maria Theresa; 'the man who had in his port- 
folios plays and sonnets and essays intended to 
teach the world contempt for kings and priests, 
this man, this Alfieri, submitted to having his 
cheek patted by Pope Braschi. This stain of 
baseness and hypocrisy with which, as he says, 
he contaminated himself, ate like a hidden and 
shameful sore into Alfieri's soul ; yet, until the 
moment of writing his autobiography, he had 
not the courage to display this galling thing of 
the past even to his most intimate friends. To 
Louise d' Albany, to the woman between whom 
and himself he boasted that there was never the 
slightest reticence or deceit, he screwed up the 
force to tell the tale of that interview only some 
time later. Alfieri, honest enough to lay bare 
his own self-degradation, was not generous 



SEP A RA TION, 1 73 

enough to hide the fact that this self-dcgrada- 
tion was incurred out of love for her. That her 
hero should have stooped so low, so low that he 
scarcely dared to tell even her, surely this must 
have been as galling to the Countess of Albany 
as was the caress of Pius VI. to Alfieri himself ; 
this high poetic love of theirs, this exotic Dan- 
tesque passion, had been dragged down, by the 
impartial legality of fate, to the humiliating 
punishment which awaited all the basest love 
intrigues in this base Rome of the base eight- 
eenth century. 

And, after some time, the stock of toleration 
bought at the price of this baseness was ex- 
hausted. The clerical friends and advisers of 
Cardinal York, who had hitherto assured the 
foolish prince of the Church that he was act- 
ing for the honor of his brother and his broth- 
er's wife in leaving a young woman of thirty-one 
to the sole care of a young poet of thirty-four, 
each being well known to be over head and ears 
in love with the other ; these prudent ecclesi- 
astics, little by little, began to change their 
minds, and the success of Alfieri's plays, the 
general interest in him and his lady which that 
success produced, suggested to them that there 
really might be some impropriety in the fami- 
liarity between the wife of Charles Edward and 
the author of Antigone. The train was laid and 



174 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

the match was soon applied. In April, 1783, 
the Pretender fell ill in Florence, so ill that his 
brother was summoned at once to what seemed 
his death-bed. Charles Edward recovered. 
But during that illness the offended husband, 
who, we must remember, had offered a reward 
for Alfieri's murder, poured out to his brother, 
moved and reconciled to him by the recent fear 
of his death, all his grievances against the Tus- 
can Court, against his wife and against her 
lover. A letter of Sir Horace Mann makes it 
clear that Charles Edward persuaded his brother 
that his ill usage of his wife (which, how- 
ever, Mann, with his spies everywhere, had 
vouched for at the time) was a mere invention, 
and part of an odious plot by which Alfieri 
had imposed upon the Grand Duke, the Pope, 
the society of Florence and Rome, nay, upon 
Cardinal York himself, in order to obtain their 
connivance in a shameful intrigue develop- 
ment. 

The Cardinal returned to Rome in a state of 
indignation proportionate to his previous saintly 
indifference to the doings of Alfieri and Mme. 
d'Albany : he discovered that he had been 
shutting his eyes to what all the world (by 
Alfieri's own confession) saw as a very hazard- 
ous state of things ; and, with the tendency to 
run into extremes of a foolish and weak-minded 



SEPARATION, 1/5 

creature, he immediately published from all the 
housetops the dishonor whose existence had 
never occurred to him before. To the Count- 
ess of Albany he intimated that he would not 
permit her to receive Alfieri under his roof; 
and of the Pope (the Pope who had so recently 
patted Alfieri's cheek) he immediately implored 
an order that Alfieri should quit the Papal 
States within a fortnight. The order was 
given ; but Alfieri, in whose truthfulness I 
have complete faith, says that, knowing that 
the order had been asked for, he forestalled the 
ignominy of being banished by spontaneously 
bidding farewell to the Countess of Albany and 
to Rome. ''This event," says Alfieri, "upset 
my brains for nearly two years, and upset and 
retarded also my work in every way." In 
speaking of Alfieri's youth I have already had 
occasion to remark that there was in this man's 
character something abnormal ; he was, as I 
have said, a moral invalid from birth ; his very 
energy and resolution had somewhat of the 
frenzy and rigidity of a nervous disease, and 
though he would seem morally stronger than 
other men when strictly following his self-pre- 
scribed rule of excessive intellectual exercise, 
and when surrounded by a soothing atmosphere 
of affection and encouragement, his old malady 
of melancholy and rage (melancholy and rage 



176 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

whom he represents in one of his sonnets as 
two horrible-faced women seated on either side 
of him), his old incapacity for work, for interest 
in anything, his old feverish restlessness of place, 
returned, as a fever returns with its heat and 
cold and impotence and delirium, whenever he 
was shut out of this atmosphere of happiness, 
whenever he was exposed to any sort of moral 
hardship. On leaving Rome Alfieri went to 
Siena, where, years before, when he had come 
light-hearted and bent only upon literary fame, 
to learn Tuscan, he had been introduced into a 
little circle of men and women whom he faith- 
fully loved, and to that Francesco Gori who 
shared with Tommaso di Caluso the rather try- 
ing honor of being his bosom friend. This 
Gori, "an incomparable man," writes Alfieri, 
" good, compassionate, and with all his auster- 
ity and ruggedness of virtue {con tanta altezza 
e ferocia di sensi) most gentle," appears literally 
to have nursed Alfieri in this period of moral 
sickness as one might nurse a sick or badly- 
bruised child. "Without him," writes Alfieri, 
" I think I should most likely have gone mad. 
But he, although he saw in me a would-be hero 
so disgracefully broken in spirit and inferior to 
himself" (this passage is characteristic, as show- 
ing that Alfieri considered himself, when in a 
normal condition, far superior to his much-praised 



SEPARATION. ' 1 7/ 

Gori), ''although he knew better tnan any the 
meaning of courage and endurance, did not, 
therefore, cruelly and inopportunely oppose his 
severe and frozen reason to my frenzies, but, 
on the contrary, diminished my pain by divid- 
ing it with me. O rare, O truly heavenly gift, 
this of being able both to reason and to feel." 

Weeping and raving, Alfieri was living once 
more upon letters received and sent as during 
his previous separation from Mme. d' Albany; 
and of all these love-letters, none appear to have 
come down to us. Carefully preserved by Mme. 
d' Albany and by her heir Fabre, they fell into 
the hands of a Mr. Gache of Montpellier, who 
assumed the grave responsibility of destroying 
them and of thus suppressing forever the most 
important evidence in the law-suit which poster- 
ity will forever be bringing against Alfieri and 
Mme. d'Albany in favor of Charles Edward, or 
against Charles Edward in favor of Alfieri and 
Mme. d'Albany. But some weeks ago, among 
the pile of the Countess' letters to Sienese 
friends preserved by Cavaliere Guiseppe Porri 
at Siena, I had the good fortune to discover what 
are virtually five love-letters of hers, obviously 
intended for Alfieri, although addressed to his 
friend Francesco Gori. I confess that an eerie 
feeling came over me as I unfolded these five 
closely-written, unsigned and undated little 



1 78 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

squares of yellow paper, things intended so ex- 
clusively for the mere moment of writing and 
reading, all that long-dead momentary passion 
of a long-dead man and woman quivering back 
into reality, filling, as an assembly of ghosts 
might fill a house and drive out its living occu- 
pants, this present hour which so soon will itself 
have become, with all its passions and worries, 
a part of the past, of the indifferent, the passion- 
less. One is frightened on being admitted to 
witness, unperceived, as by the opening of a 
long-locked door, or by some spell said over a 
crystal globe or a beryl stone, such passion as 
this ; one feels as if one would almost rather 
not. These five letters, as I have said, are ad- 
dressed to a *' Dear Signor Francesco, friend of 
my friend," and who, of course, is Francesco 
Gori ; and are written, which no other letters of 
Mme. d' Albany's are, not in French, but in tol- 
erably idiomatic but far from correct Italian. 
Only one of them has any indication of place or 
date, "Genzano, Mardi;" but this, and the ref- 
erences to Alfieri's approaching journey north- 
ward and to Gori's intention of escorting him as 
far as Genoa, is sufficient to show that they 
must have been written in the summer of 1783, 
when Cardinal York, terrified at the liberty 
which he had allowed to his sister-in-law, had 
conveyed her safely to some villa in the Alban 



SEPARATION. 1/9 

Hills. The woman who wrote these letters is a 
strangely different being from the quiet jog- 
trot, rather cynically philosophical Countess of 
Albany whom we know from all her other innu- 
merable manuscript letters, from the published 
answers of Sismondi, of Foscolo and of Mme. 
de Souza to letters of hers which have disap- 
peared. The hysterical frenzy of Alfieri seems 
to have entered into this woman ; he has worked 
up this naturally placid but malleable soul, this 
woman in bad health, deprived of all friends, 
jealously guarded by enemies, weak and de- 
pressed, until she has become another himself, 
"weeping, raving," like himself, but unable to 
relieve, perhaps to enjoy, all this frantic grief 
by running about like the mad Orlando, or talk- 
ing and weeping by the hour to a compassionate 
Gori. 

" Dear Signor Francesco," she writes, "■ how 
grateful I am to you for your compassion. You 
can 't have, a notion of our unhappiness. My 
misery is not in the least less than that of our 
friend. There are moments when I feel my 
heart torn to pieces thinking of all that he must 
suffer. I have no consolation except your being 
with him, and that is something. Never let 
him remain alone. He is worse, and I know 
that he greatly enjoys your society, for you are 
the only person who does not bore him and 



I80 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

whom he always meets with pleasure. Oh! 
dear Signer Francesco, in what a sea of miseries 
are we not ! You also, because our miseries are 
certainly also yours. I no longer live ; and if it 
were not for my friend, for whom I am keeping 
myself, I would not drag out this miserable life. 
What do I do in this world .'' I am a useless 
creature in it ; and why should I suffer when it 
is of no use to any one .? But my friend — I 
cannot make up my mind to leave him, and he 
must live for his own glory ; and as long as he 
lives, even if I had to walk on my hands, I 
would suffer and live. Who knows what will 
happen, it is so long since the man in Florence 
(Charles Edward) is ill, and still he lives, and it 
seems to me that he is made of iron in order 
that we may all die. You will say, in order to 
console me, that he can 't last ; but I see things 
clearly. This illness has not made him younger, 
but he may live another couple of years. He 
may at any moment be suffocated by the 
humors which have risen to his chest. What a 
cruel thing to expect one's happiness from the 
death of another ! O God ! how it degrades 
one's soul ! And yet I cannot refrain from 
wishing it. What a thing, what a horrible 
thing is life ; and for me it has been a continual 
suffering, all except the two years that I spent 
with my friend, and even then I lived in the 



SEPARATION. l8l 

midst of fears. And you also are probably not 
happy ; with a heart like yours it is not possible 
that you should be. Whoever is born with any 
feeling can scarcely enjoy happiness. I recom- 
mend our friend to your care, particularly his 
health. Mine is not so bad ; I take care of my- 
self and stay much in bed to kill the time and 
to rest my nerves, which are very weak. Good- 
bye, dear Signor Francesco ; preserve your 
friendship for me ; I deserve it, since I appreci- 
ate you." 

Later on she writes again: — 

" Dear Signor Francesco, friend of ours. I 
do all I can to take courage. I study as much 
as I can. Music aione distracts my thoughts, 
or rather deadens them, and I play the harp 
many hours a day, and I do so also because I 
know that my friend wishes me to get to play 
it well. I work at it as hard as I can. I live 
only for him ; without him life would be odious 
to me, and I could not endure it, I do nothing 
in this world ; I am useless in it ; and where is 
the use of suffering for nothing t But there is 
my friend, and I must remain on this earth. I 
do not doubt of him ; I know how much he 
loves me. But in moments of suffering I have 
fears lest he should find some one who would 
give him less pain than myself, with whom he 
might live cheerful and happy. I ought to 



1 82 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

wish it, but I have not got the strength to do 
so. But I believe so fully in him that I am sat- 
isfied as soon as he tells me that such a thing 
cannot happen. I love him more than myself ; 
it is a union of feeling which we only can 
understand. 1 find in him all that I can desire ; 
he is everything for me ; and yet I must suffer 
separation from him. Certainly if I could come 
to a violent decision I should be the happiest 
woman in the world ; I should never think of 
the past ; I should live in him and for him, for 
I care for nothing in this world. Comfort, lux- 
ury, position, all is vanity for me ; peace by his 
side would suffice for me. And yet I am con- 
demned to languish far from him. What a 
horrible life ! " 

Again she writes to Gori : — 

**Dear friend, I am so very, very grateful for 
the interest you take in my unhappy situation, 
which is really terrible. Time serves only to 
aggravate it, and certainly it will bring no allevia- 
tion to my misery until I shall meet our friend. 
There is no peace, no tranquillity for me. I 
would give whatever of life may remain to me 
in order to live for one day with him, and I 
should be satisfied. My feelings for him are 
unchangeable, and I am sure that his for me are 
the same. When shall I see the end of my 
woes } Who knows whether I shall ever see 



SEPARATION. 1 83 

it ? That man (Charles Edward) does not seem 
inclined to depart .... I suffer a little from my 
nerves .... but those are the least of my suf- 
ferings. It is the heart which suffers. I have 
moments of despair when I could throw myself 
out of the window were it not for the thought 
that I must live for my friend's sake ; that my 
life is his. I feel a disgust for life which is so 
reasoned out that I say to myself sometimes, 
*Why do I live.? What good do I do.?' and 
then I Continue to suffer patiently, remembering 
my friend. Forgive me for unbosoming myself 
with you, who alone can understand me ; you 
alone, except my friend, understand what I suf- 
fer. Do you know, you ought to come and see 
me this winter, you would give me such a pleas- 
ure. Good-bye, dear Signor Francesco ; pre- 
serve your friendship for me." 

Thus she runs on, repeating and re-repeating 
the same ideas, the same words, her love for 
Alfieri, her desperate situation, her hatred of 
life, her uselessness, her desire to play the harp 
well for Alfieri's sake, her hopes that Charles 
Edward may die ; disconnected phrases run into 
each other without so much as a comma or a 
full stop (since I have had to punctuate my trans- 
lation, at least partially, to make it intelligible) ; 
the excited, unconsecutive, unceasing, discur- 
sive, reiterating gabble of hysteria, eager, vague, 



1 84 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

impotent, thoughts suddenly vanishing and as 
suddenly coming to a dead stop ; everything 
rattled off as if between two sobs or two con- 
vulsions. Did Alfieri enjoy receiving letters 
such as these ? Doubtless ; they were echoes 
of his own ravings — fuel for his own passion 
and vanity. It did not strike him, for all the 
Greek and Roman heroes and heroines whom 
he had made to speak with stoical, unflinching 
curtness, that there could be anything to move 
shame, and compassion sickened by shame, in 
the fact that this should be the expression of 
that high and pure love imitated from Dante 
and Petrarch. What could he do } Give up 
Louise d'Albany, forget her, and bid her who 
lived only in him, whom a few years must free, 
forget him at the price of breaking her heart ? 
Certainly not. But he, the man, the man free to 
move about, to work, with friends and occupa- 
tions, should surely have tried to teach resigna- 
tion and patience to this poor, lonely, sick, 
hysterical woman, pointing out to her that if only 
they would wait, and wait courageously, the mo- 
ment of liberation and happiness must come. 
Surely more difficult and humiliating for this 
lover to bear than the sight of his lady degraded 
by the foul words and deeds of the drunken Pre- 
tender, ought to have been the reading of such 
letters as these ; the sight of this once calm and 



SEPARATION. 1 85 

dignified woman, of this Beatrice or Laura, in her 
disconnected hysterical ravings. And for myself, 
the thought of all that the Countess of Albany en- 
dured at the hands of Charles Edward awakens 
less pity, though pity mixed with indignation at 
the fate which humiliated her so deeply, and 
with shame for that deep humiliation, than that 
sudden cry with which she stops in the midst of 
the light-headed gabble about her miseries, and 
seems to start back ashamed as at the sight of 
her passion and tear-defiled face in a mirror : 
"What a cruel thing to expect one's happiness 
from the death of another ! O God ! how it de- 
grades one's soul ! " 



CHAPTER XII. 

COLMAR. 

"On the 17th August, 1784, at eight in the 
morning, at the inn of the Two Keys, Colmar, 
I met her, and remained speechless from excess 
of joy." So runs an annotation of Alfieri on 
the margin of one of his lyrics. 

The hour of liberty and happiness had come 
for Alfieri and Mme. d' Albany ; sooner by far 
than they expected, and sooner, we may think, 
than they deserved. Liberty and happiness, 
however, not in the face of the law. Charles 
Edward was still alive ; but, pressed by King 
Gustavus III. of Sweden, whom he contrived to 
wheedle out of some most unnecessary money, 
he had consented to a legal separation from his 
fugitive wife ; as a result of which the Countess 
of Albany, renouncing all money supplies from 
the Stuarts, and subsisting entirely upon a 
share of the two pensions, French and Papal, 
granted to her husband, was permitted to spend 
a portion of the year wheresoever she pleased, 
provided she returned for a while to show her- 



COLMAR 187 

self in the Papal States. On hearing the un- 
expected news, Alfieri, who was crossing the 
Apennines of Modena with fourteen horses 
that he had been to buy in England, was seized 
with a violent temptation to send his caravan 
along the main road, and gallop by cross-paths 
to meet the Countess, who was crossing the 
Apennines of Bologna on her way from Rome 
to the baths of Baden in Switzerland. The 
thought of her honor and safety restrained him, 
and he pushed on moodily to Siena. But, as on 
a previous occasion, his stern resolution not to 
seek his lady soon gave way ; and two months 
later followed that meeting at the Two Keys at 
Colmar on the Rhine. 

For the first time in those seven long years 
of platonic passion, Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany 
found themselves settled beneath the same roof. 
To the mind of this Italian man, and this half- 
French, half-German woman of the eighteenth 
century, for whom marriage was one of the sac- 
raments of a religion in which they wholly dis- 
believed, and one of the institutions of a society 
which alleviated it with universal adultery ; to 
Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany the legal separation 
from Charles Edward Stuart was equivalent to 
a divorce. The Pretender could no longer pre- 
scribe any line of conduct to his wife ; she was 
free to live where and with whom she chose ; 



l88 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

and if she were not free to marry, the idea, the 
wish for marriage, probably never crossed the 
brains of these two platonic lovers of seven 
years' standing. Marriage was a social contract 
between people who wished to obtain each 
other's money and titles and lands — who wished 
to have heirs. Alfieri, who had made over all 
his property to his sister, and the Countess, 
who lived on a pension, had no money or titles 
or lands to throw together ; and they certainly 
neither of them, the man living entirely for his 
work, the woman living entirely for the man, 
had the smallest desire to have children, heirs 
to nothing at all. What injury could their liv- 
ing together now do to Charles Edward, who 
had relinquished all his husband's rights .^ None, 
evidently. On the other hand, what harm could 
their living together do to their own honor or 
happiness, now that they had had seven years' 
experience that only death could extinguish 
their affection } None, again evidently. And 
as to harm to the institutions of society, what 
were those institutions, and what was their 
value, that they should be respected } Such, 
could we have questioned them, would have 
been the answers of Alfieri and the Countess. 
That they were setting an example to others 
less pure in mind, less exceptional in position ; 
that they were making it more difficult for mar- 



COLMAR. 189 

riage to be reorganized on a more rational plan, 
by showing men and women a something that 
might do instead of rationally organized mar- 
riage ; that they were, in short, preventing the 
law from being rectified, by taking the law into 
their own hands ; such thoughts could not enter 
into the mind of continentals of the eighteenth 
century, people for whom the great Revolution, 
Romanticism, and the new views of society 
which grew out of both, were still in the future. 
That a punishment should await them, that as 
time went on and youthful passion diminished, 
their lives should be barren and silent and cold 
for want of all those things, children, legal 
bonds, social recognition, by which their union 
should fall short of a real marriage ; this they 
could never anticipate. 

For the moment, united in the ** excessively 
cleon and comfortable " little chateau, rented by 
Madame d'Albany at a short distance from Col- 
mar ; riding and driving about in the lovely 
Rhine country ; the Countess deep in her read- 
ing again, Alfieri deep once more in his writ- 
ings ; together, above all, after so many months 
of separation, they seemed perfectly happy — 
so happy that it seemed as if a misfortune must 
come to restore the natural balance of things ; 
and the misfortune came, in the sudden news of 
the death of poor Francesco Gori. A sense as 



IQO COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

of guiltiness at having half forgotten that 
thoughtful and gentle friend, in the first flush of 
their happiness, seems to have come over them. 

" O God ! " wrote Alfieri to Gori's friend Bi- 
anchi at Siena, "• I don't know what I shall do. 
I always see him and speak to him, and every 
smallest word and thought and gesture of his 
returns to my mind and stabs my heart. I do 
not feel very sorry for him : he cared little for 
life for its own sake, and the life which he was 
forced to lead was too far below his great soul, 
and the goodness and tenderness of his heart, 
and the nobility of his noble scornfulness. The 
person dearest to me of any, and immediately 
next to whom I loved Checco [Gori] most, knew 
and appreciated him and is not to be consoled 
for such a loss. I told him already last July, 
so many, .many times, that he was not well, that 
he was growing visibly thinner day by day. 
Oh ! I ought never to have left him in this 
state." 

A letter, this one on Gori's death, which 
may induce us to forgive the letters of Alfieri 
of which we have seen a reflection in those of 
Mme. d'Albany : the passionate grief for the 
lost friend making us feel that there is some- 
thing noble in the possibility of even the 
morbid grief at the lost mistress. More touch- 
ing still, bringing home what each of us, alas ! 



COLMAR. 191 

must have felt in those long, dull griefs for one 
who is not our kith and kin, whom the thoughts 
of our nearest and dearest, of our work, of all 
those things which the world recognizes as ours 
in a sense in which the poor beloved dead was 
not, does not permit us to mourn in such a way 
as to satisfy our heart, and the longing for 
whom, half suppressed, comes but the more 
pertinaciously to haunt us, to make the present 
and future, all where he or she is not, a blank ; 
more touching than any letter in which Alfieri 
gives free vent to his grief for poor Gori, is that 
note which he wrote upon the manuscript of 
his poem on Duke Alexander's murder, after 
the annotation saying that this work was re- 
sumed at Siena, the 17th July, 1784: "O God! 
and the friend of my heart was still living 
then;" the words which a man speaks or writes 
only for himself, feeling that no one, not those 
even who are the very flesh and blood of his 
heart, can, since they are not himself, feel that 
terrible pang at suddenly seeing the past- so 
close within his reach, so hopelessly beyond his 
grasp. 

The death of Gori seemed the only circum- 
stance which diminished the happiness of Al- 
fieri and Mme. d'Albany ; nay, it is not heart- 
less, surely, to say that, cruel as was that 
wound, there was doubtless a quite special, sad 



192 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

sweetness in each trying to heal it in the other, 
in the redoubled love due to this fellow-feeling 
in affliction, the new energy of affection which 
comes to the survivors whenever Death calls 
out the warning, *' Love each other while I still 
let you." But they had still to pay, and pay 
in many instalments, the price of happiness 
snatched before its legitimate time. 

Supposed to be living apart from Alfieri, the 
Countess could not, therefore, take him back 
with her to Italy, where, according to the stipu- 
lations of the act of separation, she was bound 
to spend the greater part of every year. Hence 
the stay at Colmar in 1784, and those in the 
succeeding years, were merely so many inter- 
ludes of happiness in the dreary life of separa- 
tion ; happiness which, as Alfieri says in one of 
his sonnets, was constantly embittered by the 
thought that every day and every hour was 
bringing them nearer to a cruel parting. 

The day came ; Alfieri had to take leave of 
Mme. d' Albany, and, as he expresses it, had to 
return to much worse gloom than before, being 
separated from his lady without having the con- 
solation of seeing Gori once more. Mechani- 
cally he returned to Siena, to Siena which it 
was impossible to conceive without his friend 
Checco ; but when he realized the empty house, 
the empty town, he found the place he had so 



COLMAR, 193 

loved insupportable, and went to spend his long 
solitary winter writing, reading, translating, 
breaking in horses, leading a slave's life to pass 
the weary time, at Pisa. In April, 1785, Mme. 
d'Albany obtained permission to quit Bologna, 
where she had spent the winter, and to go to 
her sisters in France. In September she and 
her lover met once more in the beloved country 
house on the Rhine. But again in December 
came another separation ; Mme. d'Albany went 
to Paris and Alfieri remained behind at Colmar. 

" Shall we then be again separated," he writes 
in a sonnet, ** by cruel and lying opinion, which 
blames us for errors which the whole world com- 
mits every day } Unhappy that I am ! The 
more I love thee with true and loyal love, the 
more must I ever refuse myself that for which 
I am always longing ; thy sweet sight, beyond 
which I ask for nothing. But the vulgar can- 
not understand this, and knows us but little, 
and does not see that thy pure heart is the seat 
of virtue." 

Strange words, and which, coming from a man 
cynical and truthful as Alfieri, may make us 
pause and refuse to affirm that this strange love, 
platonic for seven long years, ceased to be a 
mere passionate friendship even when it resorted 
to the secrecy and deceptions of a mere com- 
mon intrigue ; even when it openly braved, in 
7 



194 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

the semblance of marriage, the opinion of the 
world at large. During those many months of 
solitude in the villa at Colmar, with no other 
company than that of his Sienese servant or sec- 
retary and of the horses, whose news he carefully 
sent, in letters and sonnets, to the Countess, Al- 
fieri appears for the first time to have got into a 
habit of excessive overwork, and to have had 
the first serious attack of the gout : overwork 
and gout, the two things which were to kill him. 
A six months' stay in Paris, where society, the 
business of printing his works, and the great 
distance of his lodgings from the house of Mme. 
d' Albany, diminished his intellectual work, kept 
him up for the moment. But in the following 
summer of the year 1787, shortly after he had 
returned to Colmar with the Countess, and had 
welcomed as a guest Tommaso di Caluso, his 
greatest friend since Gori's death, he suddenly 
broke down under a terrific attack of dysentery. 
F'or many days, reduced to a skeleton, ice-cold 
even under burning applications, and just sufiEi- 
ciently alive to feel in his intensely proud and 
masculine nature the cruel degradation of an ill- 
ness which made him an object of loathing to 
himself, Alfieri remained at death's door, devot- 
edly tended by his beloved and by his friend. 

"It grieved me dreadfully to think that I 
should die, leaving my lady, and my friend, and 



COLMAR. 195 

that fame scarcely rough-hewn for which I had 
worked and frenzied myself so terribly for more 
than ten years," writes Alfieri; **for I felt very 
keenly that of all the writings which I should 
leave behind me, not one was completed and 
finished as it should have been had time been 
given me to complete and perfect according to 
my ideas. On the other hand, it was a great 
consolation to know that if I must die I should 
die a free man, and between the two best be- 
loved persons that I had, and whose love and 
esteem I believed myself to possess and to de- 
serve. 

Alfieri recovered. But with that illness 
ends, I think, the period of his youth, and of 
his genius, that is to say, of that high-wrought 
and passionate austerity and independence of 
character which was to him what artistic en- 
dowment is to other writers ; and with that ill- 
ness begins a premature old age, *mental and 
moral, decrepitude gradually showing itself in a 
kind of ossification of the whole personality; 
the decrepitude which corresponds, on the other 
side of a brief manhood of comparative strength 
and health, to the morally inert and sickly years 
of Alfieri's strange youth. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

RUE DE BOURGOYNE. 

Alfieri's mother, an old lady of extreme sim- 
plicity of mind and gentleness of spirit, was still 
living at Asti, cheerfully depriving herself of 
every luxury in order to devote her fortune, as 
she devoted her thoughts and her strength, to 
the services of the poor and of the sick. Al- 
fieri, who had left her as a boy, and scarcely 
seen her except for a few hours at rare intervals, 
looked up to her less with the affection of a 
son than with the satisfaction of an artist who 
sees in the woman of whom he is born the 
peculiar type of features or character which he 
prizes most in womankind ; if he, for all his 
conscious weaknesses, was more like his own 
heroes than any man of his acquaintance, if 
Mme. d' Albany might be j udiciously got up as the 
Laura of his affections, the old Countess Alfieri 
was even more unmistakably the mother who 
suited his ideas, the living model of his mother 
of Virginia, or his mother of Myrrha. To the 
Countess Alfieri he had, already in 1784, intro- 



RUE DE BOURGOYNE, 197 

duced the Countess of Albany, whom she 
invited to stay with her on her passage through 
Asti as she returned from Colmar into Italy. 
Mme. d'Albany found an excuse for not accept- 
ing in the bad state of the roads, which ren- 
dered another route than that of Asti preferable. 
Frank and indifferent to the world's opinion as 
was Mme. d'Albany, her originally cut-and-dry 
intellectual temper hardened by many years' 
misery, one can conceive that she should shrink 
from accepting the hospitality of Alfieri's 
mother. Alfieri had doubtless shown her his 
mother's letters, and from these letters, as re- 
flected in his answers, it is clear that the 
Countess of Albany, returning from that first 
stay with her lover at Colmar, would have felt 
that she was tacitly deceiving the noble old 
lady under whose roof she was staying. For the 
Countess Alfieri, noble and Italian, and woman 
of the eighteenth century though she was, 
seems to have been one of those persons into 
whose mind, high removed above all worldly 
concerns, no 'experience of vice, of weakness, 
nay, of mere equivocal situations, can enter. 
Whatever she may have seen or heard in her 
youth of the habits of women of her century 
and station, of the virtual divorce which, after 
a few years, reigned in aristocratic houses, of 
authorized lovers and socially accepted infidelity. 



198 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 

seems to have passed out of her memory and 
left her mind as innocent as it may have been 
during her convent school-days. She had taken 
great interest in this poor young woman, mal- 
treated by a drunken husband, and finally saved 
from his clutches by the benevolence of the 
Grand Duke of Tuscany and of a prince of the 
Church, about whom her son had written to 
her. That her son experienced more than her 
own pity for so worthy an object, that he was 
at all compromised in the fate of this virtuous, 
unhappy lady, never entered her mind. So 
little could she understand the muddy things of 
this world, that in 1789, when Alfieri was pub- 
licly living with Mme. d' Albany at Colmar, 
the Countess Alfieri sent him, through his 
friend Caluso, the suggestion of a match which 
she had greatly at heart, between him and a 
young lady of Asti, ''fifteen or sixteen years 
old, without any faults, such as he would cer- 
tainly like, cultivated, docile and clever." It is 
one of the things which grate upon one most in 
Alfieri's character, and which show that how- 
ever much he might be cast and have chiselled 
himself in antique heroic form, he was yet made 
of the same stuff as his contemporaries, to find 
that he and his friend Caluso merely amused 
themselves immensely at this proposal of mar- 
riage, and concocted a dutiful letter to the old 



RUE DE BOURGOYNE. 1 99 

Countess explaining that matrimony was not at 
present in his plans. What would Mme. Al- 
fieri have thought had she known the truth ! 
It is very sad to think how, in some cases, the 
very noblest and purest, just because they are 
so completely noble and pure and above all the 
base necessities of the world of passion, must 
be unable to see, in the doings of others less 
fortunate than themselves, those very elements 
of nobility and purity which redeem the baser 
circumstances of their lives. That Mme. 
d' Albany had loved a man not her husband, had 
fled from her husband and united her life to 
that of her lover, would be a horror visible to 
the old Countess' eyes ; the platonic purity, the 
fidelity, the loyalty of this long and illegitimate 
love, would have escaped her. No art is so 
cruelly contemptuous of whatever of beauty and 
sweetness imperfect reality may contain, as the 
art which is able to attain an ideal perfection ; 
and thus it is also in matters of appreciation of 
man by man and woman by woman. The 
Countess of Albany was apparently more frank 
than Alfieri, because frank rather from temper- 
ament than from pre-occupation about a given 
ideal of conduct. 

That the mother of Alfieri should understand 
so little seems to have worried her ; and when 
the unsuspecting old lady asked her sympathiz- 



200 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

■>» 
ingly for news of Charles Edward, she wrote 
back as follows : '* As to my husband he is 
better ; but I must confess to you, madame, 
that I cannot take so lively an interest in him 
as you suppose, for he made me, during nine 
years, the most wretched woman that ever 
lived. If I do not hate him it is a result of 
Christian charity, and because we are desired 
to pardon. He drags out a miserable life, aban- 
doned by all the world, without relatives or 
friends, given over to his servants ; but he has 
willed it thus, since he has never been able to 
live with any one. Forgive me, madame, for 
having entered into such details with you ; but 
the friendship which you have shown towards 
me obliges me to speak sincerely." Mme. 
d' Albany, writing some time before to condole 
about the death of Alfieri's half-brother, had 
tried to insinuate to the old Countess what her 
son was for her, and what position she herself 
might one day assume in the Alfieri family : 
*'I hope that if circumstances change, you 
will not see a family die out to which you are 
so attached, and that you will receive the great- 
est consolation from M. le Comte Alfieri." 
Words which could only mean that when the 
Pretender died Mme. Alfieri might hope for a 
daughter-in-law in the writer, and for grand- 
children through her. But Mme. Alfieri did 



RUE DE BOURGOYNE. 20I 

not understand ; imagining, perhaps, that Mme. 
d' Albany was alluding to some project of mar- 
riage of her friend M. le Comte Alfieri ; and 
the letter in which the ill-treated wife's aver- 
sion to her husband was first openly revealed 
appears to have acted as a thunder-clap, and to 
have, at least momentarily, put an end to all 
correspondence. 

The Countess of Albany was mistaken in 
supposing that Charles Edward would die in 
the arms of mere servants. The very year 
after her own separation from Alfieri, the Pre- 
tender had called to Florence the natural daugh- 
ter born to him by Miss Walkenshaw, and whom 
he had left, apparently forgotten for twenty- 
five years, in the convent at Meaux, where her 
mother had taken refuge from his brutalities, 
even as Louise d' Albany had taken refuge from 
them in the convent of the Bianchette. Partly 
from a paternal feeling born of the unexpected 
solitude in which his wife's flight had left him ; 
partly, doubtless, from a desire to spite the 
Countess ; he had solemnly, as King of Eng- 
land, legitimated this daughter, and created her 
Duchess of Albany: he had made incredible 
efforts, abandoning drink, going into the world, 
and keeping open house, to attach this young 
woman to him and to treat her as well as he 
had treated his wife ill. 



202 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

Charlotte of Albany, a strong, lively, good- 
humored, big creature, devoted to gaiety, effect- 
ually reformed her father in his last years, and 
turned him from the brute he had been to a 
tolerably well-behaved old man. But we must 
not, therefore, conclude that Charlotte was a 
better woman, or a woman more desirous of 
doing her duty, than Louise d'Albany. Be- 
tween the two there was an abyss : Charlotte 
had been sent for by a man weary of solitude, 
smarting under the frightful punishment brought 
upon his pride by the flight of his wife ; ready 
to do anything in order not to be alone and de- 
spised by the world ; a man broken by illness 
and age, weak, hysterical, incapable almost of 
his former excesses ; and Charlotte was a woman 
of thirty, she was a daughter, she was free to 
go where she would to marry, and her father 
could buy her presence only at the price of sub- 
mission to her tastes and to her desires. 

How different had it not been with Louise of 
Stolberg : united to this man twelve years be- 
fore, a mere child of nineteen, given over to him 
as his wife, his chattel, his property, to torment 
and lock up as he might torment and lock up 
his dog or his horse ; losing all influence over 
him with every day which made her less of a 
novelty and diminished the chance of an heir ; 
and sickened and alarmed more and more by the 



RUE DE BOURGOYNE. 203 

obstinate jealousy and drunkenness and brutality 
of a man still in the vigor of his odious passions. 
Still, the fact remains that while Louise d'Al- 
bany was secretly or openly making light of 
all social institutions, and living as the mistress, 
almost the wife, of Alfieri ; this insignificant 
Charlotte, this bastard of a Miss Walkenshaw, 
this woman who had probably never had an en- 
thusiasm, or an ideal, or a thought, had succeed- 
ed in reclaiming whatever there remained of 
human in the degraded Charles Edward ; had 
succeeded in doing the world the service of 
laying out at least with decency and decorum 
this living corpse which had once contained the 
soul of a hero, so that posterity might look upon 
it without too much contempt and loathing, nay, 
almost, seeing it so quiet and seemingly peace- 
ful, with compassion and reverence. 

And when, at the beginning of February, 1788, 
the Countess of Albany, in the full enjoyment 
of her love for Alfieri, and of the pleasures of 
the most brilliant Parisian society, received the 
news that on the last day of January Charles Ed- 
ward had passed away peacefully in the arms of 
the Duchess Charlotte, and that the drink-soiled, 
broken body, from which she must so often have 
recoiled in disgust and terror, had been laid out, 
with the sad mock royalty of a gilt wooden 
sceptre and pinchbeck crown, in state in the 



204 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

cathedral of Frascati; when, I say, the news 
reached Paris, this woman, so confident of hav- 
ing been in the right, and who had written so 
frankly that if she did not hate her husband is 
was from mere Christian charity and the duty of 
forgiveness, felt herself smitten by an unexpect- 
ed grief. 

Alfieri, who witnessed it with astonishment, 
and to whose cut-and-dry nature it must have 
seemed highly mysterious, was, nevertheless, in 
a way overawed by this sudden emotion at the 
death of the man who had made both lovers so 
miserable. His appreciation, difficult to so nar- 
row a temper, of all that may move our sympa- 
thy in that, to him, unintelligible grief, is, I 
think, one of the facts in his life which brings 
this strange, artificial, heroic, admirable, yet re- 
pulsive character, most within reach of our affec- 
tion ; as that same grief, so unexpected by herself, 
at what was after all her final deliverance, is, to- 
gether with the letter to Alfieri's mother telling 
of her hatred to Charles Edward, and that excla- 
mation in the hysterical love-letter at Siena — 
" O God ! how this degrades the soul ! " — one 
of the things which persuade us that this woman 
whom we shall see inconsistent, worldly and 
cynical, did really possess at bottom what her 
lover called '^a most upright and sincere and 
incomparable soul." 



RUE DE BOURGOYNE. 205 

"For the present," wrote Alfieri to his Sien- 
ese friends on the occasion of Charles Edward's 
death, ''nothing will be altered in our mode of 
life." In other words, the Countess of Albany 
and he*r lover, established publicly beneath the 
same roof in Paris, did not intend getting mar- 
ried. Whatever hopes may have filled Mme. 
d' Albany's heart when, years before, she had 
hinted to Alfieri's mother that when certain 
circumstances changed, the Alfieri family should 
be saved from extinction ; whatever ideas Alfieri 
had had in his mind when he prayed in a sonnet 
for the happy day when he might call his love 
holy ; whatever intention of repairing the in- 
jury done to social institutions, may at one time 
have mingled with the lovers' remorse and the 
lovers* temptations, — had now been completely 
forgotten. 

We have seen how, more than once, love, 
however self-restrained, had induced Alfieri to 
put aside all his republican sternness and truth- 
fulness, and to cringe before people whom 
he thoroughly despised ; we cannot easily for- 
get that ignominious stroking of the Brutus 
poet's cheek by Pope Pius VI. We shall now 
see how this peculiar sort of Roman and stoical 
virtue, cultivated by Alfieri in himself and in 
his beloved as the one admirable thing in the 
world, a strange exotic in this eighteenth-cen- 



206 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 

tury baseness, had nevertheless withered in 
several of its branches, beaten by the wind of 
illegitimate passion, and dried up by the cal- 
lousness of an immoral state of society : an 
exotic, or rather a precocious moral variety, 
come before its season, and bleached and 
warped like a winter flower. 

Alfieri and the Countess did not get married, 
simply, I think, because they did not care to 
get married ; because marriage would entail 
reorganization of a mode of life which had 
somehow organized itself ; because it would 
give a commonplace prose solution to what 
appeared a romantic and exceptional story ; and 
finally because it might necessitate certain 
losses in the way of money, of comfort and of 
rank. 

One sees throughout all his autobiography 
and letters that Alfieri drew a sharp distinction 
between love and marriage ; that he conceived 
marriage as the act of a man who sets up shop, 
so to say, in his native place, goes in for having 
children, for being master in his own house, 
administering and increasing his estates, and 
generally devoting himself to the advancement 
of his family. As such Alfieri, who was essen- 
tially a routinist, respected and approved of 
marriage ; and anything different would have 
struck his martinet, rule-and-compass mind as 



RUE DE BOURGOYNE. 20/ 

ridiculous and contemptible. In giving up his 
fortune to his sister, Alfieri had deliberately 
cut himself off from the possibility of such a 
marriage ; moreover, putting aside the financial 
question, his notion of the liberty of a writer, 
who must be able to speak freely against any 
government, was incompatible with his notion 
of a father of a family, settled in dignity in his 
ancestral palace ; and finally, I feel perfectly 
persuaded that in the mind of Alfieri, which 
saw things only in sharpest black and white 
contrasts, there existed a still more complete 
incompatibility between a woman like the 
Countess of Albany, and a wife such as he con- 
ceived a wife : to marry Mme. d'AlTjany would 
be to degrade a poetical ideal into vulgar domes- 
ticity, and at the same time to frightfully depart 
from the normal type of matrimony, which re- 
quired that the man be absolute master, and 
not afflicted with any sort of sentimental re- 
spect for his better half. 

According to Alfieri, there were two possi- 
bilities for the ideal man : a handsome and 
highly respectable marriage with a girl twenty 
years his junior, fresh from the convent, pro- 
vided with the right number of heraldic quar- 
terings, acres, diamonds and domestic virtues, 
and who would bear him, in deep awe for his 
unapproachable superiority, five or six robust 



208 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

children ; and a romantic connection with a 
married woman or a widow, a woman all pas- 
sion and intellect and aspiration, with whom he 
should go through a course of mutual soul im- 
provement, who should be the sharer of all 
his higher life, and whom he would diligently 
deck out as a Beatrice or a Laura in the eyes of 
society. 

The Countess of Albany did not fit into the 
first ideal : nor, for the matter of that, did Al- 
fieri, poor, expatriated, mad for independence, 
engrossed in literature, fit into it himself ; and 
both, as it happened, fitted in perfectly to the 
second ideal possibility. To get married with 
a view to turning into domestic beings, would 
be a failure, a trouble, an interruption, a dese- 
cration and a bore ; to get married merely to 
go on as they were at present, would, in the 
eyes of Alfieri, have been a profanation of the 
poetry of their situation, a perfectly unneces- 
sary piece of humbug. 

Such were, doubtless, Alfieri' s views of the 
case. Mme. d' Albany, on the other hand, had 
evidently no vocation as a housewife or a 
mother ; marriage was full of disagreeable asso- 
ciations to her : a husband might beat one, and 
a lover might not. She probably, also, guessed 
instinctively that to Alfieri a Laura must al- 
ways be a mere mistress, and a wife must always 



RUE DE BOURGOYNE. 209 

be a mere Griselda^ she knew his cut-and- 
dry views, his frightful power of carrying 
theory into practice ; she may have guessed 
that the most respectful of lovers would in his 
case make the most tyrannical of husbands. But 
while Alfieri doubtless brought Mme. d' Albany 
to share his abstract reasons, Mme. d' Al- 
bany probably brought home to him her own 
more practical ones. Alfieri, we must remem- 
ber, had been a man of excessive social vanity ; 
and much as he despised mankind, he certainly 
still liked to enjoy its admiring consideration. 
Mme. d' Albany, on the other hand, had been 
brought up in the full worldliness of a canoness 
of Ste. Wandru, and had grown accustomed to 
a certain amount of state and of luxury ; and 
these worldly tendencies, thrown into the back- 
ground by the passion, the poetry which sprang 
up with the irresistible force of a pressed-down 
spring during her married misery, had re- 
turned to her as years went on, and as passion 
cooled and poetry diminished. Now marriage 
would probably involve a great risk of a diminu- 
tion of income, since the Pope and the Court of 
France might easily refuse to support Charles 
Edward's widow once she had ceased to be a 
Stuart ; and it must inevitably mean an end to 
a quasi-regal mode of life to which the widow 
of the Pretender could lay claim, but the wife of 



2IO COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

a Piedmontese noble could not. It is one of the 
various meannesses, committed quite uncon- 
sciously by Mme. d' Albany, and apparently 
not censured by the people of the eighteenth 
century, that, so far from being anxious to 
shake off all vestiges of her hateful married life, 
the Countess of Albany, on the contrary, seemed 
determined to enjoy, so to speak, her money's 
worth; to get whatever advantages had been 
bought at the price of her marriage with Charles 
Edward. Mme. d' Albany enjoyed being the 
widow of a kind of sovereign. Rather easy- 
going and familiar by nature, she nevertheless 
assumed towards strangers a certain queenly 
haughtiness which frequently gave offence ; and 
Sir Nathaniel Wraxall, who was introduced at her 
house in 1788, found to his surprise that all the 
plate belonging to Mme. d' Albany was engraved 
with the royal arms of England ; that guests were 
conducted through an ante-room in which stood 
a royal throne also emblazoned with the arms 
of England ; nay, that the servants had orders 
to address the lady of the house by the title of 
a queen : a state of things whose institution by 
a woman who affected nobility of sentiment and 
who made no secret of her hatred of Charles 
Edward, whose toleration by a man who scorned 
the world and abhorred royalty, is one of those 
strange anomalies which teach us the enor- 



RUE DE BOURGOYNE, 211 

mous advance in self-respect and self-consis- 
tency due to social and democratic progress, an 
improvement which separates in feeling even 
the most mediocre and worldly men and women 
of today from the most high-minded and eccen- 
tric men and women of a century ago. 

To marry Alfieri would mean, for the Count- 
ess of Albany, to risk part of her fortune and 
to relinquish her royal state, as well as to sink 
into a mere humdrum housewife. Hence, in 
both parties concerned, a variety of reasons, 
contemptible in our eyes, excellent in their own, 
against legitimating their connection. And, on 
the other hand, no corresponding inducement. 
Why should they get married .'* The Countess 
going in state every Sunday to a convent where 
she was received with royal honors, Alfieri 
writing to his mother that although he was not 
regular at confession, he was yet provided with 
a most austere and worthy spiritual director in 
case of need, neither of them had the smallest 
belief in Christianity nor in its sacraments. 
To please whom should they marry, pray } To 
please religion } Why, they had none. To 
please society } Why, society, in this Paris of 
the year 1788, at least such aristocratic society 
as they cared to see, consisted entirely either 
of devoted couples of high-minded lovers each 
with a husband or wife somewhere in the back- 



212 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

ground, or of even more interesting triangular 
arrangements of high-minded and devoted wife, 
husband and lover, all living together on charm- 
ing terms, and provided, in case of disagreement, 
each with a letti'e de cachet which should lock 
the other up in the Bastile. A Queen of Eng- 
land by right divine, keeping open house in 
company with a ferociously republican Pied- 
montese poet, was indeed a new and perhaps a 
questionable case ; but the pre-revolutionary 
society of Paris was too philosophical to be sur- 
prised at anything ; and, after very little hes- 
itation, resorted to the charming Albany-Alfieri 
hotel in the Rue de Bourgoyne. Now, if the 
well-born and amusing people in Paris did not 
insist upon Alfieri and the Countess getting 
married, why should they go out of their way 
to do so ? We good people of the nineteenth 
century should have liked them the better ; but 
then, you see, it was the peculiarity of the men 
and women of the eighteenth century to be 
quite unable to conceive that the men and 
women of the nineteenth century would be in 
the least different from themselves. 



CHAPTER XIV. 



BEFORE THE STORM. 



The well-born and amusing people of the end 
of the eighteenth and beginning of the nine- 
teenth century did not stickle at the question 
of the marriage. They flocked to the hotel of 
the Rue de Bourgoyne, attracted by the pecu- 
liar cosmopolitan charm, the very undeniable 
talent for society, the extraordinary intellectual 
superiority of Mme. d' Albany ; attracted, also, 
by a certain easy-going and half-motherly kind- 
ness which seems, to all those who wanted 
sympathy, to have been quite irresistible. It 
was the moment of the great fermentation, when 
even trifling things and trifling people seemed 
to boil and seethe with importance ; when cold- 
hearted people were suddenly full of tenderness 
and chivalry, selfish people full of generosity, 
prosaic people full of poetry, and mediocre peo- 
ple full of genius : the brief carnival week of 
the Old World, when men and women masquer- 
aded in all manner of outlandish and antiquated 
thoughts and feelings, and enjoyed the excite- 



214 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

ment of dressing up so much that they actually 
believed themselves for the moment to be what 
they pretended : it was the brief moment, gro- 
tesque and pathetic, when the doomed classes 
of society, who were fatally going to be exter- 
minated for their long selfishness and indiffer- 
ence, enthusiastically caught up pick-axe and 
shovel and tore down the bricks of the edifice 
which was destined to fall and to crush them all 
beneath its ruins. 

All these men and women, their deep inborn 
corruption momentarily transfigured by this 
enthusiasm for liberty, for equality, for senti- 
ment, for austerity, which mingled oddly with 
their childish pleasure in all new things, in 
mesmerism, in America, in electricity, in Mont- 
golfier balloons, with their habitual pleasure in 
all their big and small futile and wicked pleas- 
ures of worldliness ; — all these men and women, 
these morituid delighted at the preparations, the 
scaffoldings, red clothes, black crape, torches 
and drums and bugles, for their own execution, 
all assembled at that hotel of the Rue de Bour- 
goyne. 

A brilliant crowd of ministers and diplomat- 
ists, and artists and pamphleteers, and wits and 
beautiful women ; perishable and perished things, 
out of which we must select one or two, cither 
as types of that which has perished, or as types 



BEFORE THE STORM. 215 

of the imperishable; and the perished, the 
amiable and beautiful women, the amusing and 
brilliantly-improvising orators and philosophers 
of the half-hour, are often that which, could we 
have chosen, we should have preserved. Most 
notable among the women, the young daughter 
of Necker, the wife of the Swedish Ambassa- 
dor, Mme. la Baronne de Stael Holstein : a 
rather mannish, superb sort of creature, with 
shoulders and arms compensating for thick, 
swarthy features ; eyes like volcanoes ; the 
laugh of the most kind-hearted of children ; the 
stride, the attitude, with her hands forever be- 
hind the back, of an unceremonious man ; a 
young woman already accounted a genius and 
felt to be a moral force. Next to her a snub, 
drab-colored Livonian, with northern eyes tell- 
ing of future mysticism, that Mme. de Krii- 
dener, as yet noted only for the droll contrast 
of her enthusiasm for St. Pierre and the sim- 
plicity of nature, with her quarterly bills of 
twenty thousand francs from Mile. Bertin, the 
Queen's milliner ; but later to be famous for 
her literary and religious vagaries, her influence 
on Mme. de Stael, her strange influence on 
Alexander of Russia. Near her, doubtless, that 
fascinating Suard, in the convent of whose sis- 
ter Mme. de Kriidener was wont to spend a 
month in religious exercises, thanking God, at 



2l6 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

the foot of the altar, for giving her a sister like 
Mile. Suard and a lover like Suard himself. As 
yet but little noticed, except as the pet friend, 
the '* younger sister" of Mme. d' Albany, a 
Mme. de Flahault, later married to the Portu- 
guese Souza ; a simple-natured little woman, 
adoring her children and the roses in her gar- 
den, and who, if I may judge by the letters 
which, many, many years later, ^he addressed 
to Mme. d' Albany, would be the woman of all 
those one would rather resuscitate for a friend, 
leaving Mmes. de Stael and de Kriidener quiet 
in their coffins. Further on, the delicate and 
charming Pauline de Beaumont, who was to be 
the Egeria of Joubert and the tenderly-beloved 
friend of Chateaubriand ; and a host of women 
notable in those days for wit or heart or looks, 
wherewith to make a new Ballad of Dead Ladies, 
much sadder than the one of Villon : " But 
where are the snows of yester-year .? " 

Round about these ladies an even greater 
number of men of what were, or passed for, em- 
inent qualities ; political for the most part, or 
busied with the new science of economy, like 
the Trudaines ; and most notable among them, 
as the typical victim of genius of the Reign of 
Terror, j^oor Andre Chenier, his exquisite imita- 
tions of Theocritus still waiting to be sorted and 
annotated in prison ; and the typical blood- 



BEFORE THE STORM. ' 21/ 

maniac of genius, the painter David, who was to 
startle Mme. d' Albany's guests, soon after the 
loth August, by wishing that the fishwives had 
stuck Marie Antoinette's head without more 
ado upon a pike. Imagine all these people as- 
sembled in order to hear M. de Beaumarchais, 
in the full glory of his millions and his wonder- 
ful garden, give a first reading of his Mere 
Coupable, after inviting them to prepare them- 
selves to weep (which was easy in those days of 
soft hearts) ^' a plein canals Or else listening 
to the cold and solemn M. de Condorcet, proph- 
esying the time when science shall have abol- 
ished suffering and shall abolish death ; little 
dreaming of those days of wandering without 
food, of those nights in the. quarries of Mont- 
rouge, of that little bottle of poison, the only 
thing that science could give to abolish his suf- 
fering. 

To all these great and illustrious people the 
Countess of Albany — I had almost said the 
Queen of England — introduced her "incom- 
parable friend" (style then in vogue). Count 
Vittorio Alfieri ; and all of them doubtless took 
a great interest in him as her lover, and a little 
interest in him as the great poet of Italy ; not 
certainly without wondering — amiable people 
as they were, and persuaded that France and 
Paris alone existed — that Mme. d' Albany should 



2l8 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 

find anything to love in this particularly rude 
and disagreeable man, and that a country like 
Italy should have the impudence to set up a poet 
of its own. The Countess of Albany, made to 
be a leader of intellectual society, was happy ; 
but Alfieri was not. Ever since his childhood, 
when a French dancing-master had vainly tried 
to unstiffen his rigid person, he had mortally 
hated the French nation ; ever since his first 
boyish travels he had loathed Paris as the sewer, 
the cloaca maxima (the expression is his own) of 
the world; his whole life had been a struggle 
with the French manners, the French language, 
which had permeated Piedmont ; one of the chief 
merits of the new drama he had conceived was 
(in his own eyes) to sweep Corneille, Racine, 
and particularly Voltaire, his arch-aversion Vol- 
taire, off the stage. 

Alfieri, with his faults and his virtues, was 
specially constructed, if I may use the expres- 
sion, to ignore all the good points, and to feel 
with hysterical sensitiveness all the bad ones, 
of the French nation ; and more especially of the 
French nation of the pre-revolutionary and rev- 
olutionary era. Alfieri's reality and Alfieri's 
ideal were austerity, inflexibility, pride and con- 
temptuousness of character, coldness, roughness, 
decision of manner, curtness, reticence and ab- 
solute truthfulness of speech ; above all, no con- 



BEFORE THE STORM. 219 

sideration for other folks' likings and dislikings, 
no mercy for their foibles. His ideal, even more 
so than the ideal of other idealizing minds, was 
the mere outcome of himself ; it contained his 
faults as well as his virtues. Now all that fell 
short of, or went beyond, his ideal — that is to 
say, himself — was abomination in Alfieri's eyes. 
Consequently France and the French, all the no- 
bility, the wit, the sentiment, the warm-hearted- 
ness, the enthusiasm, the wide-mindedness, the 
childishness, the frivolity, the instability, the dis- 
respectfulness, the sentimentality, the high falut- 
inism, the superficiality, the looseness of princi- 
ple, everything that made up the greatness and lit- 
tleness of the France of the end of last century, 
everything which will make up the greatness 
and littleness of France, the glories and weak- 
nesses which the world must love to the end of 
time; — all these things were abhorrent to Al- 
fieri ; and Alfieri, when once he disliked a per- 
son or a thing, justly or unjustly, could only in- 
crease but never diminish his dislike. Let us 
look at this matter, which is instructive to all 
persons whose nobility of character runs to in- 
justice, a little closer ; it will help us to under- 
stand the Misogallo, the extraordinary apostasy 
which, quite unconsciously, Alfieri was later to 
commit towards the principle of freedom. Al- 
fieri, intensely Italian, if mediaeval and peasant 



220 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

Italy may give us the Italian type, in a certain 
silent or rather inarticulate violence of temper 
— violence which roars and yells and stabs and 
strangles, but which never talks, and much less 
argues — could not endure the particular sort of 
excitement which surrounded him in France ; 
excitement mainly cerebral, heroism or villainy 
resulting, but only as the outcome of argument 
and definition of principle and of that mixture 
of logic and rhetoric called by the French des 
mots. Alfieri was not a reasoning mind, he was 
not an eloquent man ; above all, he was not a 
witty man ; his satirical efforts are so many 
blows upon an opponent's head ; they are almost 
physical brutalities ; there is nothing clever or 
funny about them. In such a society as this 
Parisian society of the years '%J, '%^, '89, '90, he 
must have been at a continual disadvantage ; 
and at a disadvantage which he felt keenly, but 
which he felt, also, that any remarkable piece of 
Alfierism which would have moved Italy to ad- 
miration, such as glaring, or stalking off in si- 
lence, or punching a man's head, could only in- 
crease. 

To feel himself at a disadvantage on account 
of his very virtues, and with people whom those 
virtues did not impress, must have been most 
intolerable to a man as vain and self-conscious 
as Alfieri, and to this was added the sense that, 



BEFORE THE STORM, 221 

from mere ignorance of the language (the lan- 
guage whose nobility, as contrasted with the 
"low, plebeian, nasal disgustingness " of French, 
he so often descanted on) in which he wrote, it 
was quite impossible for these people to be re- 
duced to their right place and right mind by 
the crushing superiority of his dramatic genius. 
He, who hungered and thirsted for glory, what 
glory could he hope among all these monkeys 
of Frenchmen, jabbering and gesticulating 
about their States-General, their Montgolfier, 
their St. Pierre, their Condorcet, their Parny, 
their Necker, who had not even the decent 
feeling to know Italian, and who bowed and 
smiled and doubtless mixed him up with Me- 
tastasio and Goldoni when introduced by the 
Countess to so odd a piece of provincialism as 
an Italian poet .»* "Does monsieur write com- 
edies or tragedies } " One fancies one can 
hear the politely indifferent question put with a 
charming smile by some powdered and em- 
broidered P'rench wit to Mme. d' Albany in 
Alfieri's hearing ; nay, to Alfieri himself. 

Mixed with such meaner, though unconscious 
motives for dissatisfaction, must have been the 
sense, intolerable to a man like Alfieri, of the 
horrid and grotesque jumble of good and bad, 
of real and false, not merely in the revolution- 
ary movement itself, but in all these men of 



222 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

the ancien regime who initiated it. Alfieri con- 
ceived liberty from the purely antique, or, if 
you prefer, pseudo-antique, point of view ; it 
was to him the final cause of the world; the 
aim of all struggles ; to be free was the one and 
only desideratum, to be master of one's own 
thoughts, actions and words, merely for the 
sake of such mastery. The practical advan- 
tages of liberty entirely escaped him, as did the 
practical disadvantages of tyranny ; nay, one 
can almost imagine that had liberty involved 
absolute misery for all men, and tryanny abso- 
lute happiness, Alfieri would have chosen 
liberty. To this pseudo-Roman and intensely 
patrician stoic, who had never known privation 
or injustice towards himself, and scarcely 
noticed it towards others, the humanitarian, the 
philanthropic movement, characteristic of the 
eighteenth century, and which was the strong 
impulse of the revolution, was absolutely incom- 
prehensible. Alfieri was, in the sense of cer- 
tain ancients, a hard-hearted man, indifferent, 
blind and deaf to suffering. That a man of 
education and mind, a gentleman, should have 
to sweep the ground with his hat on the pas- 
sage of another man, because that other hap- 
pened to wear a ribbon and a star; that he 
should be liable to exile, to imprisonment, for a 
truthful statement of his opinion, these were 



BEFORE THE STORM. 223 

to Alfieri the insupportable things of tyranny. 
But that a man in wooden shoes and a torn 
smock frock, sleeping between the pigs and the 
cows on the damp clay floor, eating bread main- 
ly composed of straw, should have all the 
profits of his hard labor taken from him in 
taxes, while another man, a splendid gentleman 
covered over with gold, riding over acres of his 
land with his hounds, or a fat priest dressed in 
silk, snoozing over his Lucullus dinner, should 
be exempt from taxation and empowered to 
starve, rob, beat or hang the peasant : such a 
thing as this did not fall within the range of 
Alfieri's feelings. To his mind, forever wrapped 
in an intellectual toga, there was no tragedy in 
mere misery ; there was no injustice in mere 
cruelty, or rather misery, cruelty, nay, all their 
allied evils, ignorance, brutality, sickness, su- 
perstition, vice, were unknown to him. 

Hence, as I have said, all the philanthropic 
side of the revolutionary movement was lost to 
him ; just as the defence of Labarre, the vin- 
dication of Calas, never disturbed the current 
of his contempt for Voltaire. So also the abo- 
lition of privileges, the secularization of church 
property, the equalization of legal punishment, 
the abrogation of barbarous laws, the liberation 
of slaves ; all these things, which stirred even 
the most corrupt and apathetic minds of the 



224 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 

late eighteenth century, seemed merely so much 
declamation to Alfieri. To him, who could con- 
ceive no virtues beyond independent truthful- 
ness, such things were mere sentimental trash, 
mere hypocritical nonsense beneath which base 
men hid their baseness. And the baseness, 
unhappily, was there : baseness of absolute cor- 
ruption, or of scandalous levity, even in the 
noblest. To Alfieri, a man like Beaumarchais, 
for all his quick philanthropy, his audacious out- 
spokenness, must have seemed base, with his 
background of money-jobbing, of dirty diplo- 
matic work, of legal squabbles. How much 
more such a man as Mirabeau, with his heroic 
resolution, his heroic kindliness, his whole Titan 
nature, carous, eaten into by a hundred mean 
vices. That Mirabeau should have gained his 
bread writing libels and obscene novels, meant 
to Alfieri not that a man born in corruption and 
tainted thereby had, by the force of his genius, 
by the force of the great humanitarian move- 
ment, raised himself as morally high as he had 
hitherto grovelled morally low ; it merely meant 
that the immaculate name of hero was degraded 
by a foul writer. 

From such figures as these Alfieri turned 
away in indignant disgust. The great move- 
ment of the eighteenth century seemed to him 
a mere stirring and splashing in a noisome 



BEFORE THE STORM. 22$ 

pool, in that cloaca maxima^ as he had called it. 

Already before settling in Paris in 1787 he 
had written to his Sienese friends that, were it not 
for the necessity of attending to the printing of 
his works (to print which permission would not 
be obtainable in Italy), he would rather have es- 
tablished himself at Prats, at Colle, at Buoncon- 
vento, at any little town of two thousand in- 
habitants near Florence or Siena, Surrounded 
by, in daily contact with, some of the noblest 
minds of the century, nay, of any century, by 
people like Mme. de Stael, Andre Chenier, Con- 
dorcet, Mirabeau, Alfieri could write, with a sort 
of bitter pleasure at his own narrow-minded- 
ness : " Now I am among a million of men, and 
not one of them that is worth Gori's little 
finger." 

I am almost prepared to say that Alfieri really 
felt as if living in Paris, among such people and 
at such a moment, was a sort of saintly sacri- 
fice, the crowning heroism of his life, which he 
made in order to print his books ; that he en- 
dured the contact of this plague-stricken city, 
merely because he knew that unless he cor- 
rected a certain number of manuscript pages, 
and revised a certain number of proof-sheets, 
the world would be defrauded of the great and 
sovereign antidote to all such baseness as this 
in the shape of his own complete works. 
8 



226 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

Writing to his mother towards the end of the 
year 1788, he mentions contemptuously the ex- 
citement and enthusiasm created by the ap- 
proaching election of the States-General, and 
adds calmly : " But all these sort of things in- 
terest me very little ; and I give my attention 
only to the correction of my proofs, a piece of 
work with which I am pretty well half through." 



CHAPTER XV. 

ENGLAND. 

The contradictions in complex and self-contra- 
dictory characters like those of the Frenchmen 
of the early revolution can be easily explained, 
and, say what we will, must be easily pardoned : 
rich natures, creatures of impulse, intensely 
sensitive to external influences, we feel that it 
is to the very richness of nature, the warmth of 
impulse, the susceptibility to influence, that we 
owe not merely these men's virtues but their 
vices. But the contradictions of the self-right- 
eous are an afflicting spectacle, over which we 
would fain draw the veil : there is no room in a 
narrow nature for any flagrant violation of its 
own ideals to be stuffed away unnoticed in a 
corner. And now we come to one of the strang- 
est self-contradictions in the history of Mme. 
d'Albany, that is to say, of her lord and master 
Alfieri. 

The revision and printing of Alfieri's works 
had been brought to an end ; but neither he 
nor the Countess seems to have contemplated 



228 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

a return to Italy. The fact was that they were 
both of them retained by money matters. A 
proportion of Mme. Albany's income consisted 
in the pension which she received from the 
French Court ; and the greater part of Alfieri's 
income consisted in certain moneys made over 
to him by his sister as the capital of his life 
pension, and which he had invested in French 
funds. 

By the year 1791 the French Court and the 
French funds had got to be very shaky ; and 
those who depended upon them did not dare go 
to any distance, lest on their return they should 
find nothing to claim or no one to claim from. 
Hence the necessity for Alfieri and the Count- 
ess to remain in France, or, at least, hover about 
near it. 

Now, whether the unsettled state of French 
affairs suggested to Mme. d' Albany, and through 
her to Alfieri, that it would be wise to see what 
sort of home, nay, perhaps, what sort of pecun- 
iary assistance, might be found elsewhere, I can- 
not tell ; but this much is certain, that on the 
19th May, 1 79 1, Horace Walpole wrote as fol- 
lows to Miss Barry : — 

" The Countess of Albany is not only in Eng- 
land, in London, but at this very moment, I be- 
lieve, in the palace of St. James ; not restored 
by as rapid a revolution as the French, but, as 



ENGLAND. 229 

was observed at supper at Lady Mount Edge- 
combe's, by that topsy-turvyhood that charac- 
terizes the present age. Within these two days 
the Pope has been burnt at Paris ; Mme. du 
Barry, mistress of Louis Quinze, has dined with 
the Lord Mayor of London ; and the Pretender's 
widow is presented to the Queen of Great Brit- 
ain." 

That we should have to learn so striking an 
episode of the journey to England from the let- 
ters of a total stranger, who noticed it as a mere 
piece of gossip, while the memoirs of Alfieri, 
who accompanied Mme. d' Albany to England, 
are perfectly silent on the subject, is, to say the 
least of it, a suspicious circumstance. 

As he grew old, Alfieri seems to have lost 
that power, nay, that irresistible desire, of speak- 
ing the truth and the whole truth which made 
him record with burning shame the caress of 
Pius VL Perhaps, on the other hand, Alfieri, 
who, after all, was but a sorry mixture of an an- 
cient Roman and a man of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, thought that a certain amount of baseness 
and dirt-eating, quite degrading in a man, might 
be permitted to a woman, even to the lady of 
his thoughts. And still I cannot help thinking 
that Alfieri, who could certainly, with his strong 
will, have prevented the Countess from demean- 
ing herself, and in so far demeaning also his love 



230 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

for her, quietly abetted this step, and then as 
quietly consigned it to oblivion. 

But oblivion did not depend upon registration 
or non-registration in Alfieri's memoirs. The 
letters of Walpole, the memoirs of Hannah 
More, the political correspondence collected by 
Lord Stanhope, furnish abundant detail of this 
affair. The Countess of Albany was introduced 
by her relation, or connection, the young Count- 
ess of Aylesbury, and announced by her maiden 
name of Princess of Stolberg. Horace Walpole's 
informant, who stood close by, told him that she 
was "well dressed, and not at all embarrassed." 
George HI. and his sons talked a good deal to 
her about her passage, her stay in England, and 
similar matters ; but the princesses none of them 
said a word, and we hear that Queen Charlotte 
''looked at her earnestly." The strait-laced 
wife of George HI. had probably consented to 
receive the Pretender's widow, only because this 
ceremony was a sort of second burial of Charles 
Edward, a burial of all the claims, the pride of 
the Stuarts; but she felt presumably no great 
cordiality towards a woman who had run away 
from her husband, who was travelling in Eng- 
land with her lover ; and who, while affecting 
royal state in her own house, could crave the 
honor of being received by the family of the 
usurper. 



ENGLAND. 23 1 

Mme. d' Albany was not abashed ; she seems 
to have made up her mind to get all she could 
out of royal friendliness. She accepted a seat 
in the King's box at the opera ; nay, she ac- 
cepted a seat at the foot of the throne (" the 
throne she might once have expected to mount," 
remarks Hannah More), on the occasion of the 
King's speech in the House of Lords. It was 
the lOth of June, the birthday of Prince Charlie ; 
and the woman who sat there so unconcernedly 
kept a throne with the British arms in her 
ante-room, and made her servants address her 
as a queen ! 

What were Alfieri's feelings when Mme. d' Al- 
bany came home in her court toilette, and told 
him of all these fine doings 1 The more we try 
to conceive certain things, the more inconceiv- 
able they become : it is like straining to see 
what may be hidden at the bottom of a very 
deep well. In the case of Alfieri I think we may 
add that the well was empty. Since his illness 
at Colmar he had aged in the most extraordi- 
nary way : the process of desiccation and ossi- 
fication of his moral nerves and muscles, which, 
as I have said, was the form that premature 
decrepitude took in this abnormal man, had 
begun. The creative power was extinct in him, 
both as regards his works and himself ; there 
was no possibility of anything new, of any re- 



232 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

sponse of this wooden nature to new circum- 
stances. He had attained to the age of forty-two 
without any particular feelings such as could fit 
into this present case, and the result was that 
he probably had no feelings. The Countess of 
Albany was the ideal woman ; he had enshrined 
her as such ages ago, and an ideal woman 
could not change, could not commit an impro- 
priety, least of all in his eyes. If she had con- 
descended to ridiculous meanness in order to 
secure for herself an opening in English society, 
a subsidy from the English Government (ap- 
parently already suggested at that time, but 
granted only many years later) in case of a 
general break-up of French things ; if she had 
done this, it was no concern of Alfieri ; Mme. 
d' Albany had been patented as the ideal woman. 
As to him, why should he condescend to think 
about state receptions, galas, pensions, kings 
and queens, and similar low things.-* He had 
put such vanities behind him long ago. 

Alfieri and the Countess made a tour through 
England and projected a tour through Scotland. 
Whether the climate, the manners, the aspect 
of England and its inhabitants really disap- 
pointed the perhaps ideal notions she had 
formed ; or whether, perhaps, she was a little 
bit put out of sorts by no pension being granted, 
and by a possible coldness of British matrons 



ENGLAND. 233 

towards a wiaow travelling about with an Italian 
poet, it is not for me to decide. But her im- 
pressions of England, as recorded in a note-book 
now at the Musee Fabre at Montpellier, are 
certainly not those of a person who has received 
a good welcome : 

'* Although I knew," she says, repeating the 
stale platitudes (or perhaps the true impres- 
sions ?) of all foreigners, *' that the English 
were melancholy, I had not imagined that life 
in their capital would be so to the point which 
I experienced it. No sort of society, and a 
quantity of crowds. . . As they spend nine 
months in the country — the family alone, or 
with only a very few friends — they like, when 
they come to town, to throw themselves into 
the vortex. W«:men are never at home. The 
whole early part of the day, which begins at two 
(for, going to bed at four in the morning, they 
rise only at mid-day), is spent in visits and 
exercise, for the English require, and their 
climate absolutely necessitates, a great deal of 
exercise. The coal smoke, the constant ab- 
sence of sunshine, the heavy food and drink, 
make movement a necessity to them. . . If 
England had an oppressive Government, this 
country and its inhabitants would be the lowest 
in the universe : a bad climate, bad soil, hence 
no sort of taste ; it is only the excellence of 



234 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

the political constitution which renders it inhab- 
itable. The nation is melancholy, without any 
imagination, even without wit ; the dominant 
characteristic is a desire for money." 

The same note as that even of such a man as 
Taine. The almost morbid love of beauty which 
a civilization whose outward expression are the 
lines and lines of black boxes, with slits for 
doors and windows of Bloomsbury, produced in 
men like Coleridge, Blake and Turner, naturally 
escaped Mme. d'Albany ; but the second great 
rebellion of imagination and love of beauty, the 
rebellion led by Madox Brown and Morris, and 
Rossetti and Burne Jones, escaped Taine. But 
of all the things which most offended this quasi- 
Queen of England in our civilization, the social 
arrangements did so most of all. With the in- 
stinct of a woman who has lived a by no means 
regular life in the midst of a society far worse 
than herself, with the instinct of one of those 
strange pseudo-French Continental mongrels 
with whom age always brings cynicism, she 
tries to account for the virtue of Englishwomen 
by accidental, and often rather nasty, necessi- 
ties. Mme. d'Albany writes with the freedom 
and precision of a Continental woman of the 
world of eighty years ago ; and her remarks lose 
too much or gain too much by translation into 
our chaster language. '' The charm of intimate 



ENGLAND. 235 

society," she winds up, conscious of the charms 
of her own little salon full of clever men and 
pretty women all well acquainted with each 
other — "the charm of intimate society is un- 
known in England." 

In short, the sooner England be quitted, the 
better. Political, or rather financial circumstan- 
ces — that is to say, the frightful worthlessness 
of French money (and Alfieri's and her money 
came mainly from France) — made a return to 
Paris urgent. 

An incident, as curious perhaps as that of 
Mme. d'Albany's presentation at Court, but 
which, unlike that, Alfieri has not thought fit to 
suppress, marked their departure from England. 
As Alfieri, who had preceded the Countess by 
a few minutes to see whether the luggage had 
been properly stored on the ship at Dover, 
turned to go and meet her, his eyes suddenly 
fell with a start of recognition upon a woman 
standing on the landing-place. She was not 
young, but still very handsome, as some of us 
may know her from Gainsborough's portrait ; 
and she was no other than Penelope Lady Ligo- 
nier, for whom Alfieri had been so mad twenty 
years before, for whom he had fought his famous 
duel in St. James' Park, and got himself disgrace- 
fully mixed up in a peculiarly disgraceful divorce 
suit. He had several times inquired after her, 



236 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

and always in vain ; and now he would scarcely 
have believed his eyes had his former mistress 
not given him a smile of recognition. Alfieri 
was terribly upset. The sight of this ghost from 
out of a disgraceful past coming to haunt what 
he considered a dignified present, seems fairly 
to have terrified him ; he ran back into the ship 
and dared not go to meet Mme. d'Albany, lest 
in so doing he should meet Lady Ligonier. Pres- 
ently Mme. d'Albany came on board. With the 
indifference of a woman of the world, of that 
easy-goingness which was rapidly effacing in her 
the romantic victim of Charles Edward, she told 
Alfieri that the friends who had escorted her to 
the ship (and who appear to have perfectly un- 
derstood the temper of the Countess) had pointed 
out his former flame and entertained her with a 
brief biography of her predecessor in Alfieri's 
heart. Mme. d'Albany took it all as a matter 
of course : she was probably no longer at all in 
love with Alfieri, but she admired his genius and 
character as much and more than ever ; and was 
probably beginning to develop a certain good- 
natured, half -motherly acquiescence in his eccen- 
tricities, such as women who have suffered much, 
and grown stout and strong, and cynically opti- 
mistic now that suffering is over, are apt to 
develop towards peoj^le accustomed to resort to 
j:hem, like sick children, in all their ups and 
downs of temper. 



ENGLAND. 237 

"Between ns," says Alfieri, "there was never 
any falsehood, or reticence, or coolness, or quar- 
rel ; " and, indeed, when a woman, such as 
Mme. d'Albany must have been at the age of 
forty, has once determined to adore and humor 
a particular individual in every single possible 
thing, all such painful results of more sensitive 
passion naturally become unnecessary. If Mme. 
d'Albany merely smiled over bygone follies, 
Alfieri had been put into great agitation by the 
sight of Lady Ligonier. From Calais he sent 
her a letter, of which no copy has been pre- 
served, but which, according to his account, 
"was full, not indeed of love, but of a deep and 
sincere emotion at seeing her still leading a 
wandering life very unsuited to her birth and 
position ; and of pain in thinking that I, 
although innocently (that 'although innocent- 
ly,' on the part of a man who had been the 
cause of her scandalous downfall, is perfectly 
charming in its simple revelation of Continental 
morals), might have been the cause or the pre- 
text thereof." 

Lady Ligonier's answer came to hand in 
Brussels. Written in bad French, it answered 
Alfieri's tragic grandiloquence with a cold civil- 
ity, which shows how deeply his magnanimous 
compassion had wounded a woman who felt her- 
self to be no more really corrupt than he. 



238 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

''Monsieur," so runs the letter, *'you could 
not doubt that the expression of your remem- 
brance of me, and of the interest which you 
kindly take in my lot, would be duly appreciated 
and received gratefully by me ; the more espe- 
cially as I cannot consider you as the cause of 
my unhappiness, since I am not unhappy, 
although the uprightness of your soul makes 
you fear that I am. You were, on the contrary, 
the agent of my liberation from a world for 
which I was in no way suited, and which I have 
not for a moment regretted. ... I am in 
the enjoyment of perfect health, increased by 
liberty and peace of mind. I seek the society 
only of simple and virtuous persons without 
pretensions either to particular genius or to 
particular learning ; and besides such society I 
entertain myself with books, drawing, music, 
etc. But what constitutes the basis of real 
happiness and satisfaction is the friendship and 
unalterable love of a brother whom I have 
always loved more than the whole world, and who 
possesses the best of hearts." "I hear," goes on 
Lady Ligonier, after a few compliments on 
Alfieri's literary fame, ''that you are attached 
to the Princess with whom you are travelling, 
whose amiable arid clever physiognomy seems 
indeed formed for the happiness of a soul as 
sensitive and delicate as yours. I am also told 



ENGLAND. 239 

that she is afraid of you : I recognize you there. 
Without wishing or perhaps even knowing it, 
you have an irresistible ascendency over all who 
are attached to you." 

Was it this disrespectful hint concerning 
what he wished the world to consider as his 
ideal love for Mme. d'Albany, or was it Lady 
Ligonier's determination to let him know that 
desertion by him had made her neither more 
disreputable nor more unhappy than before t I 
cannot tell ; but certain it is that something in 
this letter appears to have put Alfieri, who had 
not objected to Mme. d' Albany's mean behav- 
ior towards George III., into a condition of 
ruffled virtue and dignity. 

" I copy this letter, " he writes in his mem- 
oirs^, "in order to give an idea of this woman's 
eccentric and obstinately evilly-inclined charac- 
ter. " 

Did it never occur to Alfieri that his own 
character, whose faults during youth he so 
keenly appreciated, was not improving with 
years ? 



CHAPTER XVI. 



THE MISOGALLO. 



Alfieri and Madame d' Albany were scarcely 
back in Paris, and settled in a new house, when 
the disorders in Paris and the movements of 
the Imperial troops on the frontier began to 
make the situation of foreigners difficult and 
dangerous. The storming of the Tuileries, the 
great slaughter of the loth August, 1792, ad- 
monished them to sacrifice everything to their 
safety. With considerable difficulty a passport 
for the Countess had been obtained from the 
Swedish Minister, one for Alfieri from the 
Venetian Resident (almost the only diplomatic 
representatives, says Alfieri, who still remained 
to that ghost of a king), and a passport for each 
of them and for each of their servants from 
their communal section. Departure was fixed 
for the 20th August, but Alfieri's black pre- 
sentiments hastened it to the i8th. Arrived at 
the Barriere Blanche, on the road to Calais, 
passports were examined by two or three sol- 
diers of the National Guards, and the gates were 
on the point of being opened to let the two 



THE MISOGALLO, 241 

heavily-loaded carriages pass, when suddenly, 
from out of a neighboring pot-house, rushed 
some twenty-five or thirty ruffians, ragged, 
drunken and furious. They surrounded the 
carriages, yelling that all the rich were running 
away and leaving them to starve without work ; 
and a crowd rapidly formed round them and the 
National Guards, who wanted the travellers to 
be permitted to pass on. Alfieri jumps out of 
the carriage, brandishing his seven passports, 
and throws himself — a long, lean, red-haired 
man, fiercely gesticulating and yelling at the 
top of his voice — among the crowd, forcing 
this man and that to read the passports, crying 
frantically, *' Look ! listen ! Name Alfieri. Ital- 
ian and not French! Tall, thin, pale, red- 
haired ; that is I ; look at me. I have my pass- 
port ! We have our passports all in order from 
the proper authorities ! We want to pass ; and, 
by God ! we will pass !" 

After half an hour of this altercation, with 
voices issuing from the crowd, " Burn the car- 
riages ! " " Throw stones at them ! " " They are 
running away ; they are noble and rich ; take 
them to the Hotel de Ville to be judged!" at 
last Alfieri' s vociferations and gesticulations 
wearied even the Paris mob, the crowd became 
quieter, the National Guards gave the sign for 
departure, and Alfieri, jumping into the car- 



242 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

riage where Mme. d' Albany was sitting more 
dead than ahve, shouted to the postilions to 
gallop off. 

At a country-house near Mons, belonging to 
the Countess of Albany's sister, the fugitives 
received the frightful news of the September 
massacres ; of those men and women driven, 
like beasts into an arena, down the prison stairs 
into the prison yard, to fall, hacked to pieces 
by the bayonets and sabres and pikes of Mail- 
lard's amateur executioners, on to the blood- 
soaked mattresses, while the people of Paris, 
morally divided on separate benches, the gen- 
tlemen here, the ladies there, sat and looked 
on ; of those men and women many had fre- 
quented the salon of the Rue de Bourgoyne, 
had chatted and laughed, only a few weeks 
back, with Alfieri and the Countess. Amongst 
those men and women Alfieri and the Countess 
might themselves easily have been, had the 
ruffians of the Barriere Blanche dragged them 
back to their house, where an order to arrest 
Mme. d'Albany arrived two days later, that very 
20th August which had originally been fixed 
for their departure. The thought of this nar- 
row escape turned the recollection of that scene 
at the Barriere Blanche into a perfect night- 
mare, which focussed, so to speak, all the fren- 
zied horror conceived by Alfieri for the French 
Revolution, for the '* Tiger-Apes " of France. 



THE MISOGALLO, '243 

By November Alfieri and Mme. d' Albany- 
were in Florence, safe ; but established in a 
miserable inn, without their furniture, their 
horses, their books ; all left in Paris ; nay, al- 
most without the necessary clothes, and with 
very little money. From the dirty inn they 
migrated into rather unseemly furnished lodg- 
ings, and finally, after some debating about 
Siena and inquiring whether a house might not 
be had there on the promenade of the Lizza, 
they settled down in the house, one of a num- 
ber formerly belonging to the Gianfigliazzi 
family, on the Lung Arno, close to the Ponte 
Santa Trinita, in Florence. The situation is 
one of the most delightful in Florence : across 
the narrow quay the windows look almost sheer 
down into the river, sparkling with a hundred 
facets in the spring and summer sunlight, cut 
by the deep shadows of the old bridges, to 
where it is lost to sight between the tall poplars 
by the Greve mouth and the ilexes and elms of 
the Cascine, closed in by the pale blue peaks of 
the Carrara Alps ; or else, in autumn and win- 
ter, scarcely moving, a mass of dark-greens and 
browns, wonderfully veined, like some strange 
oriental jasper, with transparent violet streak- 
ings, and above which arise, veiled, half washed 
out by mist, the old corbelled houses, the church 
steeples and roofs, the tiers and tiers of pine 
and ilex plumes on the hill opposite. 



244 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 

For a moment, with the full luminousness of 
the Tuscan sky once more in his eyes, and the 
guttural strength of the Tuscan language once 
more in his ears, Alfieri seems to have been 
delighted. But his cheerfulness was not of 
long duration. Ever since his great illness at 
Colmar, Alfieri had, I feel persuaded, become 
virtually an old man ; his strength and spirits 
were impaired, and the strange morose depres- 
sion of his half-fructified youth seemed to re- 
turn. Coming at that moment, the disappoint- 
ment, the terror, the horror of the French 
Revolution became, so to speak, part of a moral 
illness which lasted to his death. ^ Alfieri was 
not a tender-hearted nor a humane man ; had 
he been, he would have felt more sympathy 
than he did with the beginning of the great 
movement, with the strivings after reform 
which preceded it ; he had, on the contrary, the 
sort of cold continuous rage, the ruthless self- 
righteousness and cut-and-dryness which would 
have made him, had he been a Frenchman, a 
terrorist of the most dreadful type, a regular 
routinist in extermination of corrupt people. 
Hence I cannot believe that, much as he may 
have been shocked by the news of the Septem- 
ber massacres, of the grandes foiirnees which 
preceded Thermidor, and much as he may have 
been distressed by Mme. d'Albany's anxiety 



THE MISOGALLO. 245 

and grief for so many friends who lost their 
property or Hfe, Alfieri was the man to be 
driven mad by the mere thought of bloodshed. 
But Alfieri had, ever since his earliest youth, 
made liberty his goddess, and the worship of 
liberty his special religion and mission. That 
such a religion and mission, to which he 
had devoted himself in a time and country 
when and where no one else dreamed of any- 
thing of the sort, should suddenly become, and 
without the smallest agency of his, the religion 
and mission of the very nation and people whom 
he instinctively abhorred from the depths of 
his soul ; that liberty, which he alone was to 
teach men to desire, should be the fashionable 
craze, mixed up with science, philanthropy, 
sentiment, and everything he hated most in 
the French, this was already a pain that gnawed 
silently into Alfieri's soul. But when liberty 
was, as it were, dragged out of his own little 
private temple, where he adored and hymned it, 
decked out in patrician dignity of Plutarch and 
Livy, and carried about, dressed in the garb of 
a Paris fishwife, a red cotton night-cap on her 
head, by a tattered, filthy, drunken, blood-stained 
crew of sanscidottes, nay, worse, rolled along 
on a triumphal car by an assembly of lawyers 
and doctors and ex-priests and journalists — 
when liberty, which had been to him antique 



246 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

and aristocratic, became modern and demo- 
cratic ; when the whole of France had turned 
into a blood-reeking and streaming temple of 
this Moloch goddess, then a sort of moral ab- 
scess, long growing unnoticed, seemed to burst 
within Alfieri's soul, and a process of slow 
moral blood-poisoning to begin. 

The Reign of Terror came to an end, the 
reaction of Thermidor set in ; but this was 
nothing to Alfieri, for, whereas the unspeakable 
profanation of what was his own personal and 
quasi-private property, liberty, had hitherto 
been limited to France, it now spread, a fright- 
ful invading abomination, with the armies of the 
Directory all over the world ; nay, to Italy 
itself. 

It was as an expression, an eternal, immortal 
expression, the severest conceivable retribution, 
Alfieri sincerely thought, of this rage, all the 
stronger as there entered into it the petty per- 
sonal vanity as well as the noble abstract 
feeling of the man — it was as an expression of 
this gallophobia that Alfieri composed his famous 
but little-read Misogallo. This collection of 
prose arguments and vituperations and versified 
epigrams, all larded and loaded with quotations 
from all the Latin and Greek authors whom Al- 
fieri was busy spelling out, does certainly con- 
tain many things which, old as they are, strike 



THE MISOGALLO. 247 

even us with the force of living contempt and 
indignation. Nay, even including its most stu- 
pid and dullest violent parts, we can sympathize 
with its bitterness and violence, when we think 
of the frightful deeds of blood which, talking 
heroically of justice and liberty, France had 
been committing ; of the miserable series of 
petty rapines and extortions which, talking pat- 
ronizingly of the Greeks and Romans, the French 
nation was practising upon the Italians whom it 
had come to liberate. That such feeling should 
be elicited was natural enough. But we feel, 
as we turn over the pages of the Misogallo, and 
collate with its epigrams a certain passage in 
Alfieri's memoirs and letters, that when we meet 
it in this particular man, in this hard, savage, 
narrow, pedantic doctrinaire, whose very mag- 
nanimity is vanity and egotism, we can no longer 
sympathize with the hatred of the French, which 
in juster and more modest men, as for instance 
Carlo Botta, invariably elicits our sympathy. 
Much as we dislike the republican French who 
descended into Italy, the Misogallo makes us 
like Alfieri even less. Whether this revolution, 
despite the oceans of blood which it shed, might 
not be bringing a great and lasting benefit to 
mankind by sweeping away the hundred and 
one obstacles which impeded social progress ; 
whether this French invasion, despite the money 



248 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

which it extorted, the statues and pictures which 
it stole, the miserable high-flown lies which it 
told, might not be doing Italy a great service in 
accustoming it to modern institutions, in train- 
ing it to warfare, in ridding it of a brood of 
inept little tyrants ; — such questions did not 
occur to Alfieri, for whom liberty meant every- 
thing, progress and improvement nothing. As 
the century drew to a close, and the futility of 
so many vaunted reforms, the hollowness of so 
many promises, became apparent to the Italians 
with the shameful treaty which gave Venice, lib- 
erated from her oligarchy, to Austria, all the 
nobler men of the day, Pindemonti, Botta, Fos- 
colo, and the crowds of nameless patriotic youths 
who filled the universities, were seized by a ter- 
rible soul-sickness ; everything seemed to have 
given way, each course was as bad as the other, 
and Italy seemed destined to servitude and in- 
dignity, whether under her new masters the 
French, or under her old masters the Austrians 
and Bourbons and priests. But the feelings of 
Alfieri were not of this kind ; he was not torn 
by patriotism ; he was simply pushed into sym- 
pathy with the tyrannies which he had so hated 
by the intolerable pain of finding that the liberty 
which Ite had preached was being propagandized 
by the nation and the class of society which he 
detested most. 



THE MISOGALLO. 249 

Such Alfieri appears to me, and such I think 
he must appear to every one who conscientiously 
studies the extraordinary manner in which this 
apostle of liberty came to preach in favor of des- 
potism. But in his own eyes, and in the eyes 
of the Countess of Albany, Alfieri doubtless 
found abundant arguments to prove himself per- 
fectly logical and magnanimous. 

This French Revolution was merely a revolt 
of slaves ; and what tyranny could be more 
odious than the tyranny of those whom nature 
had fitted only for slavery .? What are the 
French ? " The French," answers one of the 
epigrams of the Misogalloy "have always been 
puppets ; formerly puppets in powder, now 
stinking and blood-stained puppets." "We 
indeed are slaves," says another epigram, "but 
at least indignant slaves " (a statement which 
the whole history of Italy in the nineties goes 
to disprove) ; " not, as you Gauls always have 
been and always will be, slaves applauding 
power whatever it be." The nasal and guttural 
pronunciation of the French language, the 
bare existence of such a word as quatraiiiy is 
enough to prove to Alfieri that the French can 
never know true liberty. Alfieri, who had 
looked the ancien regime more than once in the 
face, actually persuaded himself that, as he 
writes, " the frightful French mob robbed and 



250 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

slaughtered the upper classes because those 
upper classes had always treated it too kindly." 
Alfieri actually got to believe these things. He 
would, had power been put in his hands, have 
headed a counter revolution and exterminated 
as many people again as the Republicans had 
exterminated. Power not being in his hands, 
he hastened to do what seemed to him a vital 
matter to all Europe, a sort of fatal thrust to 
France : he solemnly recanted all his former 
writings in favor of revolutions and republics. 
He, who had witnessed the taking of the Bas- 
tile and sung it in an ode, deliberately wrote as 
follows: "The famous day of the 14th July, 
1789, crowned the victorious iniquity (of the 
people). Not understanding at that time the 
nature of these slaves, I dishonored my pen by 
writing an ode on the taking of the Bastile." 
Surely, if we admit that to see liberty degraded 
by its association with revolutionary horrors 
must have been unbearably bitter to the nobler 
portion of Alfieri's nature, we must admit that 
to see Alfieri himself, Alfieri so proud of his 
former ferocious love of liberty, turned into a 
mere ranting renegade, is an unendurable spec- 
tacle also ; we should like to wash our hands 
of him as he tried to wash his hands of the 
Revolution. 

All this political atrabiliousness did not im- 



THE MISOGALLO. 25 1 

prove Alfieri's temper, and could not have 
made it easier or more agreeable to live with 
him. The Countess of Albany naturally dis- 
liked the Revolution and the French, after all 
the grief and inconvenience which she owed 
them ; she naturally, also, disliked everything 
that Alfieri disliked. Still, I cannot help fan- 
cying that this woman, far more intellectual 
than passionate, and growing more indifferent, 
more easy-going, more half-optimistically, half- 
cynically charitable towards the world with 
every year that saw her grow fat, and plain, and 
dowdy, — I cannot help fancying that the 
Countess of Albany must have got to listen to 
Alfieri's misogallic furies much as she might 
have listened to his groans had he been afflicted 
with gout or the toothache, sympathizing with 
the pain, but just a little weary of its expres- 
sion. She must also, at times, have compared 
the little company of select provincial notabili- 
ties, illustrious people never known beyond 
their town and their lifetime, which she col- 
lected about herself and Alfieri in the house by 
the Arno, with the brilliant society which had 
assembled in her hotel in Paris. 

To her, who was, after all, not Italian, but 
French by education and temper, and who had 
been steeped anew in French ideas and habits, 
this small fry of Italian literature, professional 



252 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

and pedantic, able to discuss and (alas ! but too 
able) to hold forth, but absolutely unable to 
talk, to causer in the French sense, must have 
become rather oppressive. She and Alfieri were 
both growing elderly, and the hearth by which 
they were seated alone, childless, with nothing 
but the ghost of their former passion, the ghost 
of their former ideal, to keep them company, 
was on the whole very bleak and cheerless. 
Alfieri working off his over-excitement in a 
system of tremendous self-education, sitting for 
the greater part of the day poring over Latin 
and Greek and Hebrew grammars, and exer- 
cises and annotated editions, till he was so ex- 
hausted that he could scarcely digest his din- 
ner ; the Countess killing the endless days 
reading new books of philosophy, of poetry, of 
fiction, anything and everything that came to 
hand, writing piles and piles of letters to every 
person of her acquaintance ; this double exist- 
ence of bored and overworked dreariness, was 
this the equivalent of marriage .? was this the 
realization of ideal love } 

But there were things to confirm Mme. d' Al- 
bany in that easy-going indifferentism which 
replaced passion and suffering in this fat, kindly, 
intellectual woman of forty ; things which, as 
they might have made other women weep, prob- 
ably made this woman do what in its way was 
just as sad — smile. 



THE MISOGALLO. 253 

Alfieri had always had what, to us, may seem 
very strange notions on the subject of love, but 
which were not strange when we consider the 
times and nation in general, and the man in 
particular. After the various love manias which 
preceded his meeting with Mme. d' Albany, he 
had determined, as he tells us, to save his peace 
of mind and dignity by refusing to fall in love 
with women of respectable position. The Coun- 
tess of Albany, by enchaining him in the bonds 
of what he called *' worthy love," had saved him 
from any chance of fresh follies with these 
alarming *' virtuous women." But follies with 
women of less respectable position and less 
obvious virtue appear to have presented no fear 
of degradation to Alfieri's mind. And now, 
late on in the nineties, when Mme. d' Albany 
was rapidly growing plain and stout and elderly, 
and he was getting into the systematic habit of 
regarding her less in her reality than in the 
ideal image which he had arranged in his mind ; 
now, when he was writing the autobiography 
where the Countess figured as his Beatrice, and 
when he was composing the Latin epitaphs 
which were to unite his tomb with that of the 
woman "aVictorio Alferio, ultra resomnia di- 
lecta," just at this time Alfieri appears to have 
returned to those flirtations with women neither 
respectable nor virtuous which seemed to him 



254 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

SO morally safe to indulge in. A very strange 
note, preserved at Siena, to a ''Nina padrona 
mia dilettissima," shows that the memory of 
Gori and the friendship of Gori's friends were 
not the only things which attracted him ever 
and anon from Florence to Siena. A collection 
of wretched bouts-rimes and burlesque doggrel, 
written at Florence in a house which Mme. 
dAlbany could not enter, and in the company 
of women whom Mme. d' Albany could not 
receive, and among which is a sonnet in which 
Alfieri explains his condescension in joining in 
these poetical exercises of the demi-monde by 
an allusion to Hercules and Omphale, shows 
that Alfieri frequented in Florence other so- 
ciety besides that which crowded round his 
lady in Casa Gianfigliazzi. 

Mme. dAlbany was far too shrewd and far too 
worldly not to see all this ; and Alfieri was far 
too open and cynical to attempt to hide it. 
Mme. d' Albany, having her praises and his love 
read to her in innumerable sonnets, in the auto- 
biography and in the epitaphs, probably merely 
smiled ; she was a woman of the eighteenth cen- 
tury, a foreigner, an easy-going woman, and had 
learned to consider such escapades as these as 
an inevitable part of matrimony or quasi-matri- 
mony. But, for all her worldly philosophy, did 
she never feel a vague craving, a void, as she 



THE MISOGALLO. 255 

sat in that big empty house reading her books 
while Alfieri was studying his Greek, a vague 
desire to have what consoles other women for 
coldness or infidelity, a son or a daughter, a nor- 
mal object of devotion, something besides Al- 
fieri, and which she could love whether deserv- 
ing\)r not ; something besides Alfieri's glory, in 
which she could take an interest whether other 
people did or did not agree ? Such a connection 
as hers with Alfieri may have had an attraction 
of romance, of poetry, connected with its very 
illegitimacy, its very negation of normal domes- 
tic life, as long as both she and Alfieri were 
young and passionately in love ; but where was 
the romance, the poetry now, and where was the 
humdrum married woman's happiness, at whose 
expense that ^ romance, that poetry, had been 
bought ? 

Mme. d' Albany, if I may judge by the enor- 
mous piles of her letters which I have myself 
seen, and by the report of my friend Signor 
Mario Pratesi, who has examined another huge 
collection for my benefit, was getting to make 
herself a sort of half-vegetating intellectual life, 
reading so many hours a day, writing letters so 
many more hours ; taking the quite unenthusi- 
astic, business-like interest in literature and pol- 
itics of a woman whose life is very empty, and, 
it seems to me, from the tone of her letters. 



256 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

growing daily more indifferent to life, more de- 
sultor}^, more cynical, more misanthropic and tit- 
tle-tattling. And Alfieri, meanwhile, was grow- 
ing more unsociable, more misanthropic, more 
violent in temper, hanging a printed card stat- 
ing that he wished no visits (one such is pre- 
served in the library at Florence) in the hall, 
pursuing and flogging street boys because they 
splashe'd his stockings by playing in the pud- 
dles ; insulting Ginguene and General Miollis 
when they attempted to be civil ; groaning over 
the victories of the French, rejoicing over the 
brutal massacres by the priest-hounded Tuscan 
populace ; going to Florence (when they were 
spending the summer in a villa) for the pleasure 
of seeing the Austrian troops enter, and of wit- 
nessing (as Gino Capponi records) the French 
prisoners or Frenchly-inclined Florentines being 
pilloried and tortured by the anti-revolutionary 
mob. Besides such demonstrations of an un- 
amiable disposition as these, working with the 
fury of an alchemist, and, perhaps, taking a hol- 
iday in that house where the doggrel verses were 
written. The Countess of Albany, who had 
been so horribly unhappy with her legitimate 
husband, must have been rather dreary of soul 
with her world-authorized lover. 

It was at this moment, as she sat, an idle, 
desultory, neither happy nor unhajopy woman, 



THE MISOGALLO, 257 

rapidly growing old, watching the century draw 
to a close amid chaos and misery, — it was at 
this moment that an eccentric English prelate, 
Lord Bristol, Bishop of Derry, introduced at the 
house on the Lung Arno a friend of his, a French 
painter, a former pupil of David, and who had 
won the Prix de Rome, by name Frangoi^Xavier 
Fabre. M. Fabre was French, but he was a 
royalist ; he hated the Revolution ; he had set- 
tled in Italy ; and in consideration of this he was 
tolerated by Alfieri. To Mme. d' Albany, on the 
other hand, the fact of Fabre being French 
must secretly have been a great recommenda- 
tion. French in language, habits, mode of 
thought, French in heart, cut off, as it seemed, 
forever from Paris and Parisian society, cooped 
up among this pedantic small fry of Florentines, 
listening all day to Alfieri's tirades against the 
French nation, the French reforms, the French 
philosophy, the French language, the French 
everything, the poor woman must have heartily 
enjoyed an hour's chat in good French with a 
real Frenchman, a Frenchman who, for all Al- 
fieri might say, was really French ; she must 
have enjoyed talking about his work, his pic- 
tures, about everything and anything that was 
not Alfieri's Greek, or Alfieri's Hebrew, or Al- 
fieri's tragedies or comedies or satires. Alfieri 
was a great genius and a great man ; and she 
9 



258 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 

loved, or imagined she loved, Alfieri like her. 
very soul. But still — still, it was somehow a 
relief when young Fabre, with his regular south- 
of-France face, his rather mocking and cynical 
French expression, his easy French talk, came 
to give her a painting lesson while Alfieri was 
pacing up and down translating Homer and Pin- 
dar with the help of a lexicon. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

CASA GIANFIGLIAZZI. 

Thus things jogged on. Occasionally a grand 
performance of one of Alfieri's plays enlivened 
the house on the Lung Arno. A room was 
filled with chairs, arranged with curtains, and a 
select company invited to see the poet (for by 
this respectful title he appears always to have 
been mentioned) play Saul or Creon, to his 
own admiration, but apparently less so to that 
of his guests. Occasionally, also, Alfieri and 
Mme. d'Albany would go for a few days to 
Siena to enjoy the conversation of a little knot 
of friends of their dead friend Gori ; a certain 
Cavaliere Bianchi, a certain Canon Ansano 
Luti, a certain Alessandro Cerretani, and one 
or two others, who met in the house of a charm- 
ing and intellectual woman, Teresa Regoli, 
daughter of a Sienese shopkeeper, married to 
another shopkeeper, called Mocenni, and who 
was one of Mme. d' Albany's most intimate 
friends. Occasionally, also, some of these would 
come for a jaunt to Florence, when Alfieri and 



260 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

the Countess moved heaven and earth (recol- 
lecting their own aversion to husbands) that the 
Grumbler, as Signor Mocenni was familiarly 
called, should be left behind, and la chkre 
Therese come accompanied (in characteristic 
Italian eighteenth-century fashion) only by her 
children and by her cavaliere scrvente, Mario 
Bianchi. These were the small excitements in 
this curious double life of more than married 
routine. Alfieri, who, as he was getting old 
and weak in health, was growing only the more 
furiously active and rigidly disciplinarian, had 
determined to learn Greek, to read all the great 
Greek authors ; and worked away with terrific 
ardor at this school-boy work, crowning his 
efforts with a self-constituted Order of Homer, 
of which he himself was the sole founder and 
sole member. He was, also, having finally 
despatched the sacramental number of trage- 
dies, working at an equally sacramental num- 
ber of satires and comedies, absolutely uncon- 
scious of his complete deficiency in both these 
styles, and persuaded that he owed it to his 
nation to set them on the right road in comedy 
and satire, as he had set them on the right road 
in tragedy. 

A ridiculous man } Not so. I have spoken 
many hard words against Alfieri ; and I repeat 
that he seems to me to have often fallen short, 



CASA GIANFIGLIAZZI, 261.- 

betrayed by his century, his vanity, his narrow- 
ness and hardness of temper, even of the ideal 
which he had set up for himself. But I would 
not have it supposed that I do not see the great- 
ness of that ideal, and the nobleness of the real- 
ity out of which it arose. That Alfieri, a strange 
mixture of the passionate man of spontaneous 
action, and of the self-manipulating, idealizing 
posetcTy should have fallen short of his own ideals, 
is perhaps the one pathetic circumstance of his 
life ; the one dash of suffering and failure which 
makes this heroic man a hero. Alfieri did not 
probably suspect wherein he fell short of his own 
ideal ; he did not, could not see that his faults 
were narrowness of nature, and incompleteness, 
meanness of conception, for, if he had, he would 
have ceased to be narrow and ceased to be mean. 
But Alfieri knew that there was something very 
wrong about himself ; he felt a deficiency, a jar 
in his own soul ; he felt, as he describes in the 
famous sonnet at the back of Fabre's portrait 
of him, that he did not know whether he was 
noble or base, whether he was Achilles or Ther- 
sites. 

'* Uom, set tu grande vile ? Mori, il saprai^ 
("Man, art thou noble or base.'* Die and thou 
shalt know it.") Thus wrote Alfieri, making, 
as usual, fame the arbiter of his worth ; and 
showing, even in the moment of seeking for 



262 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 

truth about himself, how utterly and hopelessly 
impossible it was for him to feel it. Mean and 
great ; both, I think, at once. But of the mean- 
ness, the narrowness of nature, the want of res- 
onance of fibre, the insufficiency of moral vitality 
in so many things ; of Alfieri's vanity, intoler- 
ance, injustice, indifference, hardness ; of all 
these peculiarities which make the real man 
repulsive, the ideal man unattractive, to us, I 
have said more than enough, and when we have 
said all this, Alfieri still remains, for all his van- 
ity, selfishness, meanness, narrow-mindedness, a 
man of grander proportions, of finer materials, 
nay, even of nobler moral shape, than the vast 
majority of men superior to him in all these 
points. Let us look at him in those last decay- 
ing years, at those studies which have seemed 
to us absurd : self-important, pedantic, almost 
monomaniac ; or brooding over those feelings 
which were, doubtless, selfish, morbid ; let us 
look at him, for, despite all his faults, he is fine. 
Fine in indomitable energy, in irrepressible pas- 
sion. Alfieri was fifty ; he was tormented by 
gout ; his health was rapidly sinking ; but the 
sense of weakness only made him more resolute 
to finish the work which (however mistakenly) 
he thought it his duty to leave completed ; more 
determined that, having lived for so many years 
a dunce, he would go down to the grave cleansed 



CASA GIANFIGLIAZZL 263 

of the stain of ignorance, having read and appre- 
ciated as much of the great writers of antiquity 
as any man who had had a well-trained youth, a 
studious manhood. Soon after his great illness 
(which, I believe, changed him so much for the 
worse by hastening premature old age) at Col- 
mar, he had written to his friends at Siena that 
he had very nearly been made a fool of by 
Death ; but that, having escaped, he intended, 
by hurrying his work, to make a fool of Death 
instead. And in 1801 he wrote in his memo- 
randum-book : ^' Health giving way /ear by year ; 
whence, hurrying to finish my six comedies, I 
make it decidedly worse." 

Soon after, as Mme. d' Albany later informed 
his friend Caluso, Alfieri, finding that his 
digestion had become so bad as to produce 
inability to work after meals, began systemati- 
cally to diminish his already extremely sober 
allowance of food ; while at the same time he 
did not diminish the exercise, walking, riding 
and driving, which he found necessary to keep 
himself in spirits. Knowing that death could 
not be far ahead, and accustomed since his 
youth to think that his life ought not to extend 
over sixty years, Alfieri was calmly and delib- 
erately walking to meet Death. 

Calmly and deliberately, but not heartlessly. 
Engrossed in his studies, devoted to his own 



264 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

glory as he was, he was still full of a kind of 
mental passion for Mme. d' Albany. He was 
unfaithful to her for the sake of low women ; 
he was neglectful of her for the sake of his 
work ; he did not, perhaps, receive much 
pleasure from this stout, plain, prosaic lady 
(like one of Rubens' women grown old, as 
Lamartine later described her) whom he left to 
her letter-writing, her reading of Kant, of La 
Harpe, of Shakespeare, of Lessing ; to her 
painting lessons and long discussions on art 
with Monsieur Fabre ; the woman whose pres- 
ence, no longer exciting, was doubtless a 
matter of indifference to him. But, neverthe- 
less, it seems to me probable that Alfieri never 
wrote more completely from his heart than 
when, composing the epitaph of the Countess, 
he said of Mme. d'Albany that she had been 
loved by him more than anything on earth, and 
held almost as a mortal divinity. "A Victorio 
Alferio . . . ultra res omnes dilecta, et quasi 
mortale numen ab ipso constanter habita et 
observata. " For a thought begins about the 
year 1796 to recur thoughout Alfieri's letters 
and sonnets, and whenever he mentions the 
Countess in his autobiography ; a thought too 
terrible not to be genuine : he or his beloved 
must die first ; one or the other must have the 
horror of remaining alone, widowed of all inter- 



CASA GIANFTGLIAZZT. 265 

est on earth. How constantly this idea haunted 
him, and with what painful vividness, is ap- 
jDarent from a letter which I shall translate 
almost in extenso ; as, together with those 
few words which I have quoted about Gori's 
death, it shows the passionate tenderness that 
was hidden, like some aromatic herb beneath 
the Alpine snow, under the harsh exterior of 
Alfieri. 

The letter is to Mme. Teresa Mocenni at 
Siena, and relates to the death of Mario Bianchi, 
who had long been her devoted cavalier servcntc. 
"Your letter," writes Alfieri, ''breaks my 
heart. I feel the complete horror of a situation 
which it gives me the shivers merely to think 
may be my situation one day or other ; and oh ! 
how much worse would it not be for me, living 
alone, isolated from every one, closed up in 
myself. O God ! I hope 1 may not be the sur- 
vivor, and yet how can I wish that my better 
self {la parte niigliore di me stesso) should endure 
a situation which I myself could never have the 
courage to endure } These are frightful things. 
I think about them very often, and sometimes 
I write some bad rhymes about them to ease 
my mind; but I never can get accustomed 
either to the thought of remaining alone nor to 
that of leaving my lady. " 

'' Some opinions," he goes on — and this han- 



266 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

kering after Christianity on the part of a man 
who had lived in eighteenth-century disbelief 
seems to bear out what Mme. d'Albany told the 
late Gino Capponi, that had Alfieri lived much 
longer he would have died telling his rosary, — 
**some opinions are more useful and give more 
satisfaction than others to a well-constituted 
heart. Thus, it does our affection much more 
good to believe that our Mario (Bianchi) is 
united to Candido (another dead friend) and to 
Gori, that they are talking and thinking about 
us, and that we shall meet them all some day, 
than to believe that they are all of them re- 
duced to a handful of ashes. If such a belief 
as the first is repugnant to physics and to math- 
ematical evidence, it is not, therefore, to be 
despised. The principal advantage and honor 
of mankind is that it can feel, and science 
teaches us how not to feel. Long live, there- 
fore, ignorance and poetry, and let us accept 
the imaginary as the true. Man subsists upon 
love ; love makes him a god : for I call God an 
intensely-felt love, and I call dogs, or French, 
which comes to the same, the frozen philoso- 
phizers who are moved only by the fact that 
two and two make four." 

Alfieri's secret desire that he might not survive 
his beloved was fulfilled sooner, perhaps, than he 
expected. The eccentric figure, the tall, gaunt 



CASA GIANFIGLIAZZI, 267 

man, thin and pale as a ghost, with flying red 
hair and flying scarlet cloak, driving the well- 
known phaeton, or sauntering moodily along 
the Lung Arno and through the Boboli gardens, 
was soon to be seen no more. As the year 
1803 wore on he felt himself hard pressed by 
the gout ; he ate less and less ; he took an 
enormous amount of foot exercise ; he worked 
madly at his memoirs, his comedies, his transla- 
tions ; he felt almost constantly fatigued and de- 
pressed. On the 3d October, 1803, after his usual 
morning's work, he went out for a drive in his 
phaeton ; but a strange and excessive cold, de- 
spite the still summer weather, forced him to 
alight and to try and warm himself by walking. 
Walking brought on violent internal pains, and 
he returned home with the fever on him. The 
next day he rose and dressed, but he was unable 
to eat or work, and fell into a long drowse ; the 
next day after that he again tried to take a 
walk, but returned with frightful pains. He 
refused to go to bed except at night, and tore 
off the mustard plasters which the doctors had 
placed on his feet, lest the blisters should pre- 
vent his walking ; dying, he would still not be 
a sick man ! The night of the 8th he was 
unable to sleep, and talked a great deal to the 
Countess, seated by his bedside, about his work, 
and repeated part of Hesiod in Greek to her. 



268 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

Accustomed for months to the idea of death, he 
does not seem to have guessed that it was near 
at hand. But the news that he was dying 
spread through Florence. A Piedmontese lady 
— strangely enough a niece of that Marchesa 
de Prie opposite to whose windows Alfieri had 
renewed the device of Ulysses and the sirens 
by being tied to a chair — hastened to a learned 
and eccentric priest, a Padre Canovai," entreat- 
ing hrm to run and offer the dying poet the 
consolations of religion. Canovai, knowing that 
both Alfieri and Mme. d'Albany were unbe- 
lievers, stoutly refused ; but later on, seized 
with remorse, he hurried to the house on the 
Lung Arno. Admitted into the sick-room, he 
came just in time to see Alfieri, who had got up 
during a momentary absence of Mme. d'Albany, 
rise from his arm-chair, lean against his bed, 
and, without agony or effort, unconscious "like 
a bird," says the Countess, give up the ghost. 
It was between nine and ten of the morning of 
the 9th October, 1803. Vittorio Alfieri was in 
his fifty-fifth year. 

The Abate di Caluso, the greatest friend he 
had, after Gori, was summoned from Turin to 
console the Countess and put all papers in order. 
Alfieri's will, made out in 1799, left all his books 
and manuscripts, and whatever small property 
he possessed, to the Countess Louise d'Albany, 



CASA GIANFIGLIAZZI. 269 

leaving her to dispose of them entirely according 
to her good pleasure. Among these papers was 
found a short letter, undated, addressed " To the 
friend I have left behind, Tommaso di Caluso, 

\ at Turin," and which ran as follows : — 

" As I may any day give way beneath the 

/ very serious malady which is consuming me, I 
have thought it wise to prepare these few lines 
in order that they may be given to you as a 
proof that you have always, to my last moment, 
been present to my mind and very dear to my 
heart. The person whom above everything in 
the world I have most respected and loved, may 
some day tell you all the' circumstances of my 
illness. I supplicate and conjure you to do your 
best to see and console her, and to concert with 
her the various measures which I have begged 
her to carry out with regard to my writings. 

*' I will not give you more pain, at present, 
by saying any more. I have known in you one 
of the most rare men in every respect. I die 
loving and esteeming you, and valuing myself 
for your friendship if I have deserved it. Fare- 
well, farewell." 



CHAPTER XVIII. 

FABRE. 

" Happiness has disappeared out of the world 
for me," wrote Mme. d' Albany in January, 
1804, to her old friend Canon Luti, at Siena. 
" I take interest in nothing ; the world might 
be completely upset without my noticing it. I 
read a little, and reading is the only thing which 
gives me any courage, a merely artificial cour- 
age ; for when I return to my own thoughts 
and think of all that I have lost, I burst into 
tears and call Death to my assistance, but 
Death will not come. O God ! what a misfor- 
tune to lose.a person whom one adores and ven- 
erates at the same time. I think that if I still 
had Therese (Mme. Mocenni) it would be some 
consolation ; but there is no consolation for 
me. I have the strength to hide my feelings 
before the world, for no one could conceive my 
misfortune who has not felt it. A twenty-six 
years' friendship with so perfect a being, and 
then to see him taken away from me at the 
very age when I required him most." 



FABRE, 271 

Alfieri a perfect being — a being adored and 
venerated by Mme. d' Albany ! One cannot 
help, in reading these words, smiling sadly at 
the strange magic by which Death metamor- 
phoses those whom he has taken in the eyes of 
the survivors ; at the strange potions by means 
of which he makes love spring up in the hearts 
where it has ceased to exist, saving us from 
hypocrisy by making us really feel what is false 
to our nature, enabling us to lie to ourselves 
instead of lying to others. The Countess of 
Albany's grief was certainly most sincere ; long 
after all direct references to Alfieri have ceased 
in her correspondence (I am speaking princi- 
pally of that with her intimates at Siena), there 
reigns throughout her letters a depression, an 
indifference to everything, which shows that 
the world had indeed become empty in her 
eyes. But though the grief was sincere, I 
greatly question whether the love was so. 
Alfieri had become, in his later years, the in- 
carnation of dreary violence ; he could not have 
been much to any one's feelings ; and Mme. 
d'Albany's engrossment in her readings, in 
political news and town gossip, even with her 
most intimate correspondents, shows that 
Alfieri played but a very small part in her 
colorless life. So small a part, that one may 
say, without fear of injustice, that Mme. 



2/2 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

d'Albany had pretty well ceased to love him at 
all ; for had she loved him, would she have 
been as indifferent, as serene as she appears in 
all her letters, while the man she loved was 
killing himself as certainly as if he were taking 
daily doses of a slow poison ? Love is vigilant, 
love is full of fears, and Mme. d'Albany was so 
little vigilant, so little troubled by fears, that 
when this visibly dying man, this man who had 
prepared his epitaph, who had settled all his 
literary affairs, who had written the farewell 
letter to his friend, actually died, she would 
seem to have been thunder-stricken not merely 
by grief, but by amazement. 

The Countess of Albany was not a selfish 
woman ; she had apparently, without complain- 
ing, sacrificed her social tastes, made herself an 
old woman before her time, in acquiescence to 
Alfieri's misanthropic and routinist self-engross- 
ment ; she had been satisfied, or thought herself 
satisfied, with the cold, ceremonious adoration 
" of a man who divided his time between his 
studies, his horses and his intrigues with other 
women ; but unselfish nat,ures are often unselfish 
from their very thinness and coldness. Alfieri, 
Heaven knows, had been selfish and self-en- 
grossed ; but, perhaps, because he was selfish 
and self-engrossed, because he was always listen- 
ing to his own ideas and nursing his own feelings, 



FAB RE. 273 

Alfieri had been passionate and loving ; and, as 
we have seen, while he seemed growing daily 
more fossilized, while he was at once engrossed 
with his own schemes of literary glory, and in- 
differently amusing himself by infidelities to his 
lady, he was then, even then, constantly haunted 
by the thought that, unless he himself were left 
behind in the terrors of widowerhood the Count- 
ess of Albany would have to- suffer those pangs 
which he felt that he himself could never en- 
dure. 

Alfieri saw the Countess through the medium 
of his own character, and he proved mistaken. 
Perhaps the most terrible, ironical retribution 
which could have fallen upon his strange egoma- 
nia, would have been, had such a thing been 
possible, the revelation of how gratuitous had 
been that terrible vision of Mme. d' Albany's 
life after his death ; the revelation of how little 
difference, after the first great grief, his loss 
had made in her life ; the revelation that, un- 
noticed, unconsciously, a successor had been 
prepared for him. 

In a very melancholy letter, dated May 31, 
1804, in which Mme. d' Albany expatiates to her 
friend Canon Luti upon the uselessness of her 
life, and her desire to end it, I find this unob- 
trusive little sentence : " Fabre desires his com- 
pliments to you. He has been a great resource 
to me in everything." 



274 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

This sentence, I think, explains what to the 
enemies of Mme. d' Albany has been a delightful 
scandal, and to her admirers a melancholy mys- 
tery ; explains, reduces to mere very simple, 
conceivable, neither commendable nor sharheful 
every-day prose, the fact that little by little the 
place left vacant by Alfieri was filled by another 
man. Italian writers, inheriting from Gordiani, 
even from Foscolo, a certain animosity against a 
woman who, as soon as Alfieri was dead, became 
once more what nature had made her, half 
French, with a great preference for P'rench and 
French things — Italian writers, I say, have 
tried to turn the Fabre episode into something 
extremely disgraceful to Mme d' Albany. Mas- 
simo d' Azeglio, partly out of hatred to the Count- 
ess, who was rather severe and acrimonious upon 
his youthful free-and-easiness, partly out of a 
desire to amuse his readers, has introduced into 
his autobiography an anecdote told him by 
Mme. de Prie (the niece of Alfieri's famous 
Turin mistress, and the lady who took it upon 
herself to send him a priest without consulting 
the Countess), to the effect that she had watched 
Fabre making eyes, kissing his fingers and gen- 
erally exchanging signals with Mme d'Albany 
at a party where Alfieri was present. Let those 
who are amused by this piece of gossip believe 
it impHcitly; it does not appear to me either 



FABRE. 275 

amusing or credible, or creditable to the man 
who retailed it. 

The Florentine society of the early years of 
this century was, if we may trust the keen ob- 
servation of Stendhal, almost as naively and 
openly profWgate as that of a South Sea Island 
village ; and such a society, which could talk of 
the things and in the way which it did, which 
could permit certain poetical compositions 
(found highly characteristic by Stendhal) to be 
publicly performed before the ladies and gentle- 
men celebrated therein, such a society naturally 
enjoyed and believed a story like that retailed 
by d'Azeglio. But surely we may put it behind 
us, we who are not Florentines of the year 1800, 
and who can actually conceive that a woman who 
had exchanged irreproachable submission to a 
drunken husband, for legally unsanctioned but 
open and faithful attachment for a man like Al- 
fieri, might at the age of fifty take a liking to a 
man of thirty-five without that liking requiring a 
disgusting explanation. The clean explanation 
seems so much simpler and more consonant. 
Fabre had become an intimate of the house 
during Alfieri's last years. He was French, he 
was a painter ; two high recommendations to 
Mme. d'Albany. He was, if we may trust Paul 
Louis Courier, who made him the hero of a 
famous imaginary dialogue, clever with a pecu- 



276 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

liarly French sort of cleverness ; he gave the 
Countess lessons in painting while Alfieri was 
poring over his work. The sudden death of 
Alfieri would bring Fabre into still closer rela- 
tions with Mme. d'Albany, as a friend of the 
deceased, the brother of his physician, and the 
virtual fellow-countryman of the Countess ; he 
would naturally be called upon to help in a 
hundred and one melancholy arrangements ; he 
received visitors, answered letters, gave orders ; 
he probably laid Alfieri in his coffin. When all 
the bustle incident upon death had subsided, 
Fabre would remain Mme. d'Albany's most 
constant visitor. He, who had seen Alfieri at 
the very last, might be admitted when the 
door was closed to all others ; he could help to 
sort the dead man's papers ; he could, in his 
artistic capacity, discuss the plans for Alfieri's 
monument, write to Canova, correspond with 
the dignitaries of Santa Croce, and so forth ; 
come in contact with the Countess in those 
manifold pieces of business, in those long con- 
versations, which seem, for a time, to keep the 
dead one still in the company of the living. 
There is nothing difficult to understand or 
shameful to relate in all this ; and the friends of 
the Countess, delicate-minded women like Mme. 
de Souza, puritanic-minded men like Sismondi, 
misanthropic or scoffing people like Foscolo or 



FABRE. 277 

Paul Louis Courier, found nothing at which to 
take umbrage, nothing to rage or laugh at, in 
this long intimacy between a woman over fifty 
and a man many years her junior; a man who 
lived at the other end of Florence, who (if I may 
trust traditions yet alive) was supposed to be 
attached to a woman well known to Mme. d' Al- 
bany ; nor have we, I think, any right to be 
less charitable than they. 

Louise d' Albany, careless, like most women 
of her day, of social institutions, and particular- 
ly hostile to marriage, was certainly not an 
impure woman ; her whole life goes to prove 
this. But Louise d'Albany was an indifferent 
woman, and the extinction of all youthful pas- 
sion and enthusiasm, the friction of a cynical 
world, made her daily more indifferent. She 
had been faithful to Alfieri, devotedly enduring 
one of the most unendurable of companions, 
loving and admiring him while he was still 
alive. But once the pressure of that strong 
personality removed, the image of Alfieri ap- 
pears to have been obliterated little by little 
from the soft wax of her character. She con- 
tinued, nay, instituted, a sort of cultus of Alfieri ; 
became, as his beloved, the priestess presiding 
over what had once been his house and was 
now his temple. 

The house on the Lung Arno remained the 



2y8 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

Casa Alfieri ; the rooms which he had inhabited 
were kept carefully untouched ; his books and 
papers were elaborated and preserved as he had 
left them ; his portraits were everywhere, and 
visitors, like Foscolo, Courier, Sismondi and the 
young Lamartine, were expected to inquire re- 
spectfully into the legend of the divinity, to ask 
to see his relics, as the visitors of a shrine might 
be expected to inquire into the legend, to ask to 
see the relics, of some great saint. Mme. d'Al- 
bany conscientiously devoted a portion of her 
time to seeingthatAlfieri's works were properly 
published, and that Alfieri's tomb in Santa Croce 
was properly executed. She was, as I have said, 
the priestess, the divinely-selected priestess, of 
the divinity. But at the same time Mme. d'Al- 
bany gradually settled down quite comfortably 
and happily without Alfieri. After the first 
great grief was over a sense of relief may have 
arisen, a sense that, after all, "'tis an ill wind 
that blows no good ; " that if she had lost Alfieri 
she had gained a degree of liberty, of independ- 
ence, that she had acquired a possibility of being 
herself with all her tastes, the very existence of 
which she had forgotten while living under the 
shadow of that strange and disagreeable great 
man. A negative sense of compensation, of 
pleasure in the foreign society to which she 
could now devote herself ; of satisfaction in the 



FABRE. 279 

mirxiature copy of her former Parisian salon 
which she could arrange in her Florentine 
house ; of comfort in a gently-bustling, uncon- 
cerned, cheerful old age ; negative feelings which, 
perhaps as a result of their very existence, seem 
little by little to have turned to a positive feel- 
ing, a positive aversion for the past which she 
refused to regret, a positive dislike to the mem- 
ory of the man whom she could no longer love. 
Horrible things to say ; yet, I fear, true. A 
man such as Alfieri had permitted himself to be- 
come, admirable in many respects, but intoler- 
ant, hard, arrogant, selfish, self-engrossed, can- 
not really be loved ; he may be endured as a re- 
sult of long habit, he may inflict his personality 
without effort upon another ; but in order that 
this be the case that other must be singularly ap- 
athetic, indifferent, malleable ; and apathetic, in- 
different and malleable people, those who never 
resist the living individual, rarely remember the 
dead one. *' She was," writes one of the most 
conscientious and respectful of men, the late 
Gino Capponi, '' heavy in feature and form, and, 
if I may say so, her mind, like her body, was 
thick-set. . . Since several years she had ceased 
to love Alfieri." 

We cannot be indignant with her ; she had 
never pretended to be what she was not. A 
highly intellectual, literary mind, a pure tem- 



280 COUNTESS OF ALBANY, 

perament, a passive, rather characterless char- 
acter, taking the impress of its surroundings ; 
passionate when Alfieri was passionate, de- 
pressed when Alfieri was depressed ; cheerful 
when Alfieri's successors, Fabre and mankind 
and womankind in general, were cheerful. To 
be angry with such a woman would be ridicu- 
lous ; but, little as we may feel attached to the 
memory of Alfieri, we cannot help saying to our- 
selves, "Thank Heaven he never understood 
what she was ; thank Heaven he never foresaw 
what she would be 1 " 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. 

A SHADOWY being, nay, a shadow cast in the 
unmistakable shape of another, so long as Al- 
fieri was alive, the Countess of Albany seems 
to gain consistency and form, to become a sub- 
stantive person, only after Alfieri's death. 
This woman, whom, in the last ten years, we 
have seen consorting almost exclusively with 
Italians, and spending the greater proportion of 
her days in solitary reading of Condillac, Lock, 
Kant, Mme. de Genhs, Lessing, Milton, every- 
thing and anything ; whose letters, exclusively 
(as far as I know them) to Italians of the 
middle classes, are full of fury against every- 
thing that is French ; this woman, who has 
hitherto been a feeble replica of Alfieri, sud- 
denly turns into an extremely sociable, chatty 
woman of the world, and a woman of the world 
who is, to all intents and purposes, French. 

To be the rallying point of a very cosmopoli- 
tan, literary, but by no means unworldly 
society, seems suddenly to have become Mme. 



282 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

d' Albany's mission ; and reading the letters 
copied from the Montpellier Archives, and pub- 
lished by M. Saint Rene Taillandier, one 
wonders how this friend of Mme. de Stael, of 
Sismondi, of Mme. de Souza, this hostess of 
Moore, of Lamartine, of Lady Morgan, of every 
sort of French, English, German, Russian or 
polyglot creature of distinction that travelled 
through Italy in the early part of this century, 
could ever have been the beloved of Alfieri, the 
misanthropic correspondent of a lot of Sienese 
professors, priests and shopkeepers. 

The fact was that Mme. d' Albany could now 
become, so to speak, what she really was ; or, 
at least, show herself to be such. Worldly wise 
and a trifle cynical she had always been ; in the 
midst of the pages of literary review and politi- 
cal newspaper constituting her letters to Mme. 
Mocenni, Canon Luti and Alessandro Cerretani 
of Siena, there is a good deal of mere personal 
gossip, stories of married women's lovers, 
married men's mistresses, domestic bickerings, 
etc., interspersed with very plain-spoken and 
(according to our ideas) slightly demoralized 
moralizings. It is evident that this was not a 
woman to shrink from the reality of things, to 
take the world in disgust, to expect too much 
of her acquaintances. On the other hand, 
these letters of the Alfieri period show Mme. 



THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. 283 

d' Albany to have been decidedly a good-natured 
and friendly woman. She has the gift of 
getting people to trust her with their little 
annoyances and grievances ; she is constantly 
administering sympathy to Mme. Mocenni for 
the tiresomeness and stupidity and harshness 
of her husband ; she keeps up a long corre- 
spondence, recommending books, correcting 
French exercises, exhorting to study and to 
virtue (particularly to abstinence from gam- 
bling), encouraging, helping Mme. Mocenni's 
boy Vittorio. -4=-She is clearly a woman who 
enjoys hearing about other folks' concerns, 
enjoys taking an interest in them, sympathizing, 
and, if possible, assisting them. 

These two qualities, a dose of cynical world- 
Jiness, sufficient to prevent all squeamishness 
and that coldness and harshness which springs 
from expecting people to be better than they 
are, and a dose of kindliness, helpfulness, pleas- 
ure in knowing the affairs and feelings and 
troubles of others ; these two qualities are, I 
should think, the essentials for a woman who 
would keep a salon in the old sense of the word, 
who would be the centre of a large but decidedly 
select society, the friend and correspondent of 
many and various people possessed of more 
genius or more character than herself. Such a 
woman, thanks to her easy-going knowledge of 



284 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

the world, and to her cordial curiosity and help- 
fulness, is the friend of the most hostile people ; 
and she is so completely satisfied with, and 
interested in, the particular person with whom 
she is talking or to whom she is writing, that 
that particular person really believes himself or 
herself to be her chief friend, and overlooks the 
scores of other chief friends, viewed with ex- 
actly the same degree of interest and treated 
with the same degree of cordiality all round. 
The world is apt to like such women, as such 
women like it, and to say of them that there 
must be an immense richness of character, an 
extraordinary power of bringing out the best 
qualities of every individual, in a woman who 
can drive such complicated teams of friends. 
But is it not more probable that the secret of 
such success is poverty of personality rather 
than richness ; and that so many people receive 
a share of friendship, of sympathy, of compre- 
hension, because each receives only very little ; 
because the universal friend is too obtuse to 
mind anybody's faults, and too obtuse, also, to 
mind anybody's great virtues } In short, do not 
such women pay people merely in the paper 
money of attention, which can be multiplied at 
pleasure, rather than in the gold coin of sym- 
pathy, of which the supply is extremely small ^-^j? 
Be this as it may, Mme. d' Albany, after hav- 



THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. 285 

ing been, in the earlier period of her Hfe, essen- 
tially the woman who had one friend, who let 
the wax of her nature be stamped in one clear 
die, became, in the twenty years which sepa- 
rate the death of Alfieri from her own, preemi- 
nently the woman with many friends, a blurred 
personality in which we recognize traces of the 
mental eflfigy of many and various people. 
Mme. d'Albany was, therefore, in superficial 
sympathy with nearly every one and in deep 
antagonism with no one : she was the ideal of 
the woman who keeps a literary and political 
salon. At that time especially, when Italy was 
visited only by people of a certain social stand- 
ing, society was carried on by a most compli- 
cated system of letters of introduction, and 
every one of any note brought a letter to Mme. 
d'Albany. " La grande lajiteriie magiqti-e passe 
tout par voire salon,' wrote Sismondi to the 
Countess ; and the metaphor could not be truer. 
Writers and artists, beautiful women, diploma- 
tists, journalists, pendants, men of science, 
women of fashion, Chateaubriand and Mme. de 
Stael, Lamartine and Paul Louis Courier, Mme. 
Recamier and the Duchess of Devonshire, Can- 
ova and Foscolo, and Sismondi and Werner, the 
whole intellectual world of the Empire and the 
Restoration, all seem to be projected, figures 
now flitting past like shadows, now dwelling 



286 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

long, clear and colored, upon the rather color- 
less and patternless background of Mme. 
d'Albany's house ; nay, of Mme. d' Albany her- 
self. 

Such readers as may wish to have all these 
figures, remembered or forgotten, pointed out 
to them, called by their right names and titles, 
treated with the perfect impartiality of a valet 
de place expounding monuments, or of a cham- 
berlain announcing the guests at a levee^ may 
refer to the two volumes of Baron Alfred von 
Reumont ; and such readers (and I hope they 
are more numerous) as may wish to examine 
some of the nobler and more interesting of 
these projected shadows of men and women, 
may read with pleasure and profit the letters of 
Sismondi, Bonstetten, Mme. de Souza and Mme. 
de Stael to the Countess of Albany, and the 
interesting pages of criticism in which they 
have been imbedded by M. Saint Rene Taillan- 
dier. With regard to myself, I feel that the 
time and space which have been given me in 
order to analyze or reconstruct the curious type 
and curious individual called Louise d'Albany 
are both nearly exhausted ; and I can therefore 
select to dwell upon, of these many magic-lan- 
tern men and women, of these friends of the 
Countess, only two, because they seem to me' 
to exemplify my remarks about the friendship 



THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. 287 

of a woman whose vocation it is to have many 
friends. The two are Sismondi and Foscolo. 

Two or three years after Alfieri's death, 
somewhere about the year 1806 or 1807, there 
was introduced to Mme. d'Albany a sort of 
half-Itahan, half-French Swiss, a man young in 
years and singularly young — with the peculiar 
earnestness, gravity, purity, which belong 
sometimes to youth — in spirit, Jean Charles 
Leonard Simonde de Sismondi. Quietly ideal- 
istic, with one of those northern, eminently 
Protestant minds which imagine the principle 
of good to be more solemnly serious, the 
principle of evil more vainly negative, than is, 
alas ! the case in this world — M. de Sismondi, 
full of the heroism of mediaeval Italy which he 
was studying with a view to his great work, 
came to the house of Alfieri, to the woman 
whom Alfieri had loved, as to things most rev- 
erend and almost sacred. The Countess of 
Albany received him very well ; and this 
good reception, the motherly cordiality of this 
woman with that light in her hazel eyes, that 
welcoming graciousness in the lines of her 
mouth, which Lamartine has charmingly de- 
scribed, with the ^^ parole S7iave, inanieres sans 
appret, familiarity rassurante,'' ''which made 
one doubt whether she was descending to the 
level of her visitor, or raising him up to her 



288 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

own,"— this reception by this woman, who was, 
moreover, still surrounded by a halo of Alfieri's 
glory, fairly conquered the heart, the pure, 
warm, grave and truthful heart of young Sis- 
mondi. He saw her often on his way between 
Geneva, whither he was called by his family 
business and his lectures, and Pescia, a little 
town nestled among the oUves of the Lucchese 
Apennine, where he was forever sighing to join 
his mother, to resume his walks, his readings 
with this noble old woman. Florence, the house 
on the Lung Arno, had an almost romantic fas- 
cination for Sismondi : those passing visits, at 
intervals of months, when Mme. d'Albany would 
devote herself entirely to the traveller, sit chat- 
ting, or rather (we feel that) listening to the 
young man's enthusiastic talk about liberty, 
letters and philanthropy, about Alfieri and Mme. 
de Stael, enabled Sismondi to make up for him- 
self a sort of half-imaginary Countess of Al- 
bany, to whom he poured out all his hopes and 
fears in innumerable letters, for whom he 
longed as (alas !) we perhaps long only for the 
phantoms of our own creating. That Mme. 
d'Albany was, after all, a shallow woman ; that 
she adored a mediocre M. Fabre (to whom Sis- 
mondi invariably sent respectful messages) and 
half disliked the memory of Alfieri ; that she 
had called Mme. de Stael, Sismondi's goddess. 



THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. 289 

about whom he was forever expatiating, " a mad 
woman who always wants to inspire passions, 
and feels nothing, and makes her readers feel 
nothing " (I am quoting from an unpublished 
letter at Siena) ; that she preferred despotism 
on the whole to liberty, and had no particular 
belief or interest in the heroic things of the 
present and future ; that she was a lover of 
gossip and scandal, sometimes (as Gino Capponi 
says) hard and disagreeable ; that she inspired 
some men, like d'Azeglio and Giordani, with a 
positive repulsion as a vulgar-minded, spiteful, 
meddlesome old thing ; that there should be 
any other Mme. d'Albany than the one of his 
noble fancy, than the woman whose image 
(fashioned by himself) he loved to unite with 
the image of his own sweet, serious, shy, noble- 
minded mother : all these things M. de Sis- 
mondi, who never guessed himself to be other- 
wise than the most unpoetical and practical of 
men, never dreamed oL So Sismondi went on 
writing to Mme. d'Albany, pouring out his grief 
at Mme. de Stael's persecutions, his schemes 
of general improvement, all the interests which 
filled his gentle, austere and enthusiastic mind. 
1 8 14 came, and 181 5. Sismondi had always 
hated, with the hatred of an Italian mediaeval 
patriot, and the hatred of an eighteenth-century 
philanthropist, the despotism, the bureaucratic 
10 



290 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

levelling, the great military slaughters of Napo- 
leon ; but when he saw Napoleon succeeded by 
the inept and wicked governments of the Res- 
toration, his heart seemed to burst. A Swiss, 
scarcely acquainted with France, the passion for 
the principles of liberty and good sense and 
progress which France had represented, the 
passion for France itself, burst out in him with 
generous ardor. This man suffered intensely 
at what to him, as to Byron and to Shelley (we 
must recollect the introduction of the Revolt of 
Islam), seemed the battle between progress and 
retrogression ; and suffered all the more as he 
was too pure and just-minded not to feel the 
impossibility of complete sympathy with either 
side. Mme. d' Albany answered his letters with 
Olympic serenity. What was it to her which 
got the upper hand } She was by this time one 
of those placid mixtures of optimism and pessi- 
mism which do not expect good to triumph, 
simply because they do not care whether good 
does triumph. Sismondi, in his adoration of 
her, thought this might be the result of a supe- 
rior magnanimity of character; yet he kept con- 
juring her to take an interest in the tragedy 
which was taking place before her eyes. If she 
will take no interest, will not Fabre 1 '* Does 
M. Fabre not feel himself turning French 
again?" writes Sismondi, and there is a pa- 



THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. .291 

thetic insistency in the question. Fabre thought 
of his pictures, his collections of antiques, per- 
haps of his dinner ; of anything save France 
and political events. Mme. d' Albany smiled 
serenely, and chaffed Sismondi a little for his 
political passions. Sismondi, of all men the 
most loyal to the idea he had formed of his 
friends, seems never to have permitted himself 
to see the real woman, the real abyss of indif- 
ference, beneath his ideal Mme. d'Albany. But 
there are few things more pathetic, I think, than 
the letters of this enthusiastic man to this cold 
woman; than the belief of Sismondi — writing 
that the retrograde measures of which he reads 
in the paper give him fits of fever, that the post 
days on which he expects political news are days 
of frenzied expectation — in the moral fibre, the 
faculty for indignation, of this pleasant, indiffer- 
ent, cynical quasi-widow of Alfieri. 

The story of the Countess and Foscolo is an 
even sadder instance of those melancholy little 
psychological dramas which go on, unseen to 
the world, in a man's soul ; little dramas without 
outward events, without deaths or partings or 
such-like similar visible catastrophes, but the 
action of which is the slow murder of an affec- 
tion, of an ideal, of a belief in the loyalty, sym- 
pathy and comprehension of another. The 
character and history of Ugo Foscolo, like Che- 



292 COUiVTESS OF ALBANY. 

nier, half a Greek in blood, and more than half 
a Greek in passionate love of beauty and in- 
domitable .love of liberty, are amongst the most 
interesting in Italian literature ; and I regret 
that I can say but little of them in this place. 
Reviewing his brief life, his long career from 
the moment when, scarcely more than a boy, he 
had entered the service of liberty as a soldier, 
a political writer, and a poet, only to taste the 
bitterness of the betrayal of Campo Formio, he 
wrote, in 1823, from London, where he was 
slowly dying, to his sister Rubina : " I am now 
nearly forty-six ; and you, although younger than 
myself, can recollect how miserable, how un- 
quiet ami uncertain our lives have always been 
ever since our childhood." Poor, vain, passion- 
ate and proud, torn between the selfish impulses 
of an exactingly sensuous and imaginative na- 
ture, and the rigid sense of duty of a heroic and 
generous mind, Ugo Foscolo was one of the ear- 
liest and most genuine victims of that sickness 
of disappointed hope and betrayed enthusiasm, 
of that Weltschnierz of which personal misfor- 
tunes seemed as but the least dreadful part, that 
came upon the noblest minds after the Revolu- 
tion, and which he has painted with great en- 
ergy and truthfulness, in his early xiowoi Jacopo 
Ortis. His career broken by his determination 
never to come to terms with any sort of base- 



THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. 293 

ness, his happiness destroyed by political disap- 
pointment, literary feuds, and a number of love 
affairs into which his weaker, more passionate 
and vainer, yet not more ungenerous temper 
was forever embroiling him, Foscolo came to 
Florence, ill and miserable, in the year 1812. 
The Countess of Albany, recognizing in him a 
something — a mixture of independence, of pas- 
sion, of vanity, of truthfulness, of pose — which 
resembled Alfieri in his earlier days (though, 
as she was unable to see, a nobler Alfieri, wider- 
minded, warmer-hearted, born in a nobler civil- 
ization and destined to give to Italy a nobler ex- 
ample, the pattern for her Leopardi, than Alfieri 
had been able to give) — the Countess of Albany 
received Foscolo well. His letters are full of 
allusions to the hours which he spent seated at 
the little round table in Mme. d' Albany's draw- 
ing-room, opposite to the '' Muse " newly bought 
of Canova, narrating to her his many and tan- 
gled love affairs ; love affairs in which he left 
his heart on all the briars, and in which, how- 
ever, by an instinct which shows the very noble- 
ness of his nature, he seems to have been im- 
pelled rather towards women whom he must love 
sincerely and unhappily, than towards Marchesa 
de Pries and Lady Ligoniers, like Alfieri ; love 
affairs in which, alas ! there was also a good dose 
of the vanity of a poet and a notorious beau. 



294 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

Mme. d' Albany, as we have seen, loved gossip ; 
and being a kind, helpful woman, she also sin- 
cerely liked becoming the confidant of other 
folks' woes. She took a real affection for this 
strange Foscolo. Foscolo, in return, ill, sore of 
heart, solitary, gradually got to love this gentle, 
sympathizing Countess with a sort of filial de- 
votion, but a filial devotion into which there en- 
tered somewhat of the feeling of a wounded man 
towards his nurse, of the feeling of a devout 
man towards his Madonna. 

His letters are full of this feeling : " My 
friend and not the friend of my good fortune," 
he writes to Mme. d' Albany in 1813, "I seem 
to have left home, mother, friends, and almost 
the person dearest to my heart in leaving Flor- 
ence." Again, " I had in you, mia Sigiiora^ a 
friend and a mother ; a person, in short, such 
as no name can express, but such as sufficed to 
console me in the miseries which are perhaps 
incurable and interminable." Her letters are 
a real ray of sunlight in his gloomy life, they 
are *' so full of graciousness, and condescension 
and benevolence and love. I venture to use 
this last word, because I feel the sentiment 
which it expresses in myself towards you." 

His health, his work, his money matters, his 
love affairs, were all getting into a more and 
more lamentable condition, in which Mme. d'Al- 



THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. 295 

bany's sympathy came as a blessing, when the 
catastrophes of 1814 and 181 5, which to Italy 
meant the commencement of a state of degra- 
dation and misery much more intolerable and 
hopeless than any previous one, came and 
drowned the various bitternesses of poor Fos- 
colo's life in a sea of bitterness. " Italy," wrote 
Foscolo to Mme. d' Albany in 18 14, *' is a corpse; 
and a corpse which must not be touched if the 
stench thereof is not to be made more horrible. 
And yet I see certain crazy creatures fantasti- 
cating ways of bringing her to life ; for myself, I 
should wish her to be buried with myself, and 
overwhelmed by the seas, or that some new 
Phaeton should precipitate upon her the flaming 
heavens, so that the ashes should be scattered 
to the four winds, and that the nations coming 
and to come should forget the infamy of our 
times. Amen." 

How strongly we feel in this outburst that, 
despite his despair, or perhaps on account of it, 
Foscolo is himself one of those '' crazy creatures 
fantasticating ways of bringing Italy to life ! " 
But the Countess did not understand ; she could 
conceive liking Bonaparte and serving him, or 
liking the Restoration and serving it ; but to 
love an abstract Italy which did not yet exist, 
to hate equally all those who deprived it of free- 
dom, that was not within her comprehension. 



296 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

And as she could not comprehend this feeling, 
the mainspring of Foscolo's soul, so she could 
understand of Foscolo only the slighter, meaner 
things : his troubles and intrigues, his loves and 
quarrels. The moment came when the grief of 
miscomprehension was revealed to poor Foscolo ; 
when he saw how little he was understood by 
this woman whom he loved as a mother. Fos- 
colo had refused, latterly, to serve Napoleon ; 
he refused, also, to serve the Austrians. Hated 
for his independent ways both by the Bonapart- 
ists and the reactionists, surrounded by spies, 
he was forced to quit Italy never to return. He 
wrote to explain his motives to Mme. d'Albany. 
Mme. d'Albany wrote back in a way which 
showed that she believed the assertions of Fos- 
colo's enemies ; that she ascribed to cowardice, 
to meanness, to a base desire to make himself 
conspicuous, the self-inflicted exile which he had 
taken upon him : a letter which the editor of 
Foscolo's correspondence describes to us in one 
word — unworthv. 

This letter came upon Foscolo like a thunder- 
clap. "So thus," he wrote to the Countess in 
August, 1815, " generosity and justice are ban- 
ished even from nobler souls. Your letter, 
Signora Contessa, grieves me, and confers upon 
me, at the same time, two advantages : it 
diminishes suddenly the perpetual nostalgia 



THE SALON OF THE COUNTESS. 297 

which I have felt for Florence, and it affords 
me an occasion to try my strength of spirit. . . 
My hatred for the tyranny with which Bona- 
parte was oppressing Italy does not imply that 
I should love the house of Austria. The differ- 
ence for me was that I hoped that Bon^iparte's 
ambition might bring about, if not the inde- 
pendence of Italy, at least such magnanimous 
deeds as might raise the Italians ; whereas the 
regular government of Austria precludes all 
such hopes. I should be mad and infamous if 
I desired for Italy, which requires peace at any 
price, new disorders and slaughterings ; but I 
should consider myself madder still and more 
infamous if, having despised to serve the for- 
eigner who has fallen, I should accept to serve 

the foreigner who has succeeded But if 

your accusation of inconstancy is unjust, your 
accusation that I want to ^ passer pour oi'iginaV 
is actually offensiv^e and mocking." 

Later, in his solitary wanderings, Foscolo's 
heart seems to have melted towards his former 
friend ; he wrote her one or two letters, con- 
ciliating, friendly, but how different from the 
former ones ! The Countess of Albany, whom 
he had loved and trusted, was dead; the woman 
who remained was dear to him as a mere relic 
of that dead ideal. 

Such is the story of Mme. d'Albany's friend- 



298 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

ship for two of the noblest spirits, Sismondi 
and Foscolo, of their day ; the noblest, the one 
in his pure austerity, the other in his magnani- 
mous passionateness, that ever crossed the 
path of the beloved of AJfieri. 



CHAPTER XX. 



SANTA CROCK. 



With her other friends, who gave less of 
their own heart and asked less of hers, Mme. 
d' Albany was more fortunate. She contrived 
to connect herself by correspondence with the 
most eminent men and women of the most dif- 
ferent views and tempers ; she made her salon 
in Florence, as M. Saint Rene Taillandier has 
observed, a sort of adjunct to the cosmopolitan 
salon of Mme. de Stael at Coppet. Her efforts 
in so doing were crowned with the very highest 
success. In 1809 Napoleon requested Mme. 
d'Albany to leave Florence for Paris, where, he 
added with a mixture of brutality and sarcasm, 
she might indulge her love of art in the new 
galleries of the Louvre, and where her social 
talents could no longer spread dissatisfaction 
with his government, as was the case in Italy. 

The one year's residence in Paris, which 
Napoleon's jealous meddlesomeness forced upon 
her, was in itself a very enjoyable time, spent 
with the friends whom she had left in '93, and 



300 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

with a whole host of fiew ones whom she had 
made since. She returned to Florence with a 
larger number of devoted correspondents than 
ever; her salon became more and more bril- 
liant ; and when, after Waterloo, the whole 
English world of politics, fashion and letters 
poured on to the Continent, her house became, 
as Sismondi said, the wall on which all the 
most brilliant figures of the great magic lantern 
were projected. 

Thus, seeing- crowds of the most distin- 
guished and delightful people, receiving piles of 
the most interesting and adoring letters, happy, 
self-satisfied, Mme. d' Albany grew into an old 
woman. Every evening until ten the rooms of 
the Casa Alfieri were thrown open ; the ser- 
vants in the Stuart liveries ushered in the 
guests ; the tea was served in those famous 
services emblazoned with the royal arms of 
England. The Countess had not yet abandoned 
her regal pretensions ; for all her condescend- 
ing cordiality towards the elect, she could 
assume airs of social superiority which some 
folk scarcely brooked, and she was evidently 
pleased when, half in earnest, Mme. de Stael 
addressed her as "My dear sovereign," "My 
dear Queen," and even when that vulgar woman 
of genius. Lady Morgan, made a buffoonish 
scene about the "dead usurper," on the death of 



SANTA CROCE. 3OI 

George III. But Mme. d' Albany herself was get- 
ting to look and talk less and less like a queen, 
either the Queen of Great Britain or the Queen 
of Hearts ; she was fat, squat, snub, dressed 
with an eternal red shawl (now the property of 
an intimate friend of mine), in a dress extremely 
suggestive of an old housekeeper. She was, 
when not doing the queen, cordial, cheerful in 
manner, loving to have children about her, to 
spoil them with cakes and see them romp and 
dance ; free and easy, cynical. Rabelaisian, if I 
may use the expression, as such mongrel French- 
women are apt to grow with years ; the nick- 
name which she gave to a member of a family 
where the tradition of her and her ways still 
persists, reveals a wealth of coarse fun which is 
rather strange in a woman who was once the 
Beatrice or Laura of a poet. She was active, 
mentally and bodily, never giving up her multi- 
farious readings, her letter-writing ; never fore- 
going her invariable morning walk, in a big 
bonnet and the legendary red shawl, down the 
Lung Arno and into the Cascine. 

Such was Louise of Stolberg, Countess of 
Albany, widow of Prince Charles Edward, 
widow, in a sense, of the poet Vittorio Alfieri ; 
and such, at the age of seventy-two, did death 
overtake her, on the 29th January, 1824. Her 
property she bequeathed to Fabre, whom a false 



302 COUNTESS OF ALBANY. 

rumor had called her husband ; and Fabre left 
it jointly to his native town of Montpellier, and 
to his friend the Cavaliere Emilio Santarelli, 
who still lives and recollects Mme. d' Albany. 

The famous epitaph, composed by Alfieri 
for himself, had been mangled by Mme. 
d' Albany and those who helped her and Canova 
in devising his tomb ; the companion epitaph, the 
one in which Alfieri described the Countess as 
buried next to him, was also mangled in its 
adaptation to a tomb erected in Santa Croce, 
entirely separate from Alfieri's. On that mon- 
ument of Mme. d' Albany, in the chapel where 
moulder the frescoes of Masolino, there is not 
a word of that sentence of Alfieri's about the 
dead woman having been to him dearer and 
more respected than any other human thing. 
Mme. d' Albany had changed into quite another 
being between 1803 and 1824: the friend of 
Sismondi, of Foscolo, of Mme. de Stael, the 
worldly friend of many friends, seemed to have 
no connection with the lady who had wept for 
Alfieri in the convent at Rome, who had borne 
with all Alfieri's misanthropic furies after the 
Revolution, any more than with the delicate, 
intellectual girl whom Charles Edward had 
nearly done to death in his drunken jealousy. 
So, on the whole, Fabre, and whosoever 
assisted Fabre, was right in concocting a new 
epitaph. 



. SANTA CROCE. 303 

But to us, who have followed the career — 
whose lesson is that of the meanness which 
lurks in noble things, the nobility which lurks 
in mean ones — of this woman from her inau- 
spicious wedding day to the placid day of her 
death, to us Louise of Stolberg, Countess of 
Albany, Queen of Great Britain, France and 
Ireland, will remain, for all blame we may give 
her and her times, a figure to remember and 
reflect upon, principally because of those 
suppressed words of her epitaph : " A Victoria 
Alferio ultra res omnes dilecta, et quasi mortale 
numert ab ipso cons tauter habita et observata. " 



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Boston, Mass. 



Messrs. Roberts Brothers Pablicatiojis. 



JFamous SHomen Series. 



MARIA EDGEWORTH 

By HELEN ZIMMERN. 



** This little volume shows good literary workmanship. It does not weary the 
reader with vague theories; nor does it give over much expression to the enthu- 
siasm — not to say baseless encomium — for which too many female biographers 
have accustomed us to look. It is a simple and discriminative sketch of one of 
the most clever and lovable of the class at whom Carlyle sneered as 'scribbling 
women.' . . • Of Maria Edgeworth, the woman, one cannot easily say too 
much in praise. That home life, so loving, so wise, and so helpful, was beautiful 
lo its end. Miss Zimmern has treated it with delicate appreciation. Her book 
is refined in conception and tasteful in execution,— all, in short, the cynic might 
say, that we expect a woman's book to be." — Neiv York Tribune. 

" It was high time that we should possess an adequate biography of this orna- 
ment and general benefactor of her time. And so we bail with uncommon pleas- 
ure the volume just published in the Roberts Brothers' series of Famous Women, 
of which it is the sixth. We have only words of praise for the manner in which 
Miss Zimmern has written her life of Maria Edgeworth. It exhibits sound 
judgment, critical analysis, and clear characterization. . . . The style of the 
volume is pure, limpid, and strong, as we might expect from a well-trained Eng- 
lish writer." — Margaret J. Presto7i, in the Hovie Jourftal. 

" We can h^rtily recommend this life of Maria Edgeworth, not only because it 
is singularly readable in itself, but because it makes familiar to readers of the 
present age a notable figure in English literary history, with whose lineaments 
we suspect most readers, especially of the present generation, are less familiar 
tiian they ought to be." — Eclectic. 

" This biography contains several letters and papers by Miss Edgeworth th.it 
have not before been made public, notably some charming letters written during 
the latter part of her life to Dr. Holland and Mr. and Mrs. Ticknor. The author 
had access to a life of Miss Edgeworth written by her step-mother, as well as to a 
large collection of her private letters, and has therefore been able to bring forward 
many facts in her life which have not been noted by other writers. The book is 
written in a pleasant vein, and is altogether a delightful one to read." — Utica 
Herald. 



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lishers^ 

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Boston, Mass, 



Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications, 



FAMOUS WOMEN SERIES. 



GEORGE SAND. 

By bertha THOMAS. 
One volume. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $i.oo. 

** Miss Thomas has accomplished a difficult task with as much good sense as 
good feeling. She presents the main facts of George Sand's life, extenuating 
nothing, and setting naught down in malice, but wisely leaving her readers to 
form their own conclusions. Everybody knows that it was not such a life as the 
women of England and America are accustomed to live, and as the worst of men 
are glad to have them Hve. ... Whatever may be said against it, its result on 
George Sand was not what it would have been upon an English or American 
woman of genius." — New York Mail and Express. 

" This is a volume of the ' Famous Women Series,' which was begun so well 
with George Eliot and Emily Fironte. The book is a review and critical analysis 
of George Sand's life and work, by no means a detailed biography. Amantine 
Lucile Aurore Dupin, the maiden, or Mme. Dudevant, the married woman, is 
forgotten in the renown of the pseudonym George Sand. 

" Altogether, George Sand, with all her excesses and defects, is a representative 
woman, one of the names of the nineteenth century. She was great among the 
greatest, the friend and compeer of the finest intellects, and Miss Thomas's essay 
will be a useful and agreeable introduction to a more extended study of her life 
and works." — Knickerbocker. 

" The biography of this famous woman, by Miss Thomas, is the only one in 
existence. I'hose who have awaited it with pleasurable anticipation, but with 
some trepidation as to the treatment of the erratic side of her character, cannot 
fail to be pleased with the skill by which it is done. It is the best production on 
George Sand that has yet been published. The author modestly refers to it as a 
sketch, which it undoubtedly is, but a sketch that gives a just and discriminating 
analysis of George Sand's life, tastes, occupations, and of the motives and impulses 
which prompted her unconventional actions, that were misunderstood by a narrow 
public. The difficulties encountered by the writer in describing this remarkable 
character are shown in the first Hue of the opening chapter, which says, ' In nam- 
ing George Sand we name something more exceptional than even a great genius.' 
Tliat tells the whole story. Misconstruction, condemnation, and isolation are the 
penalties enforced upon the great leaders in the realm of advanced thought, by 
the bigoted people of their time. The thinkers soar beyond the common herd, 
whose soul-wings are not strong enough to fly aloft to clearer atmospheres, and 
consequently they censure or ridicule what they are powerless to reach. George 
Sand, even lo a greater extent than her contemporary', George Eliot, was a victim 
to ignorant social prejudices, but even the conservative world was forced to recog- 
nize the matchless genius of these two extraordinary women, each widely different 
in her character and method of thought and writing. . . . She has told much that 
is good which has been untold, and just what will interest the reader, and no more, 
'n the same easy, entertaining style that characterizes all of these unpretentious 
jiographies." — Hartford Times. 



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ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 
FAMOUS WOMEN SEEIES. 



MARY LAMB. 

By ANNE GILCHRIST. 
One volume. 16mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00. 



" The story of Mary Lamb has long been familiar to the readers of Ella, but 
never in its entirety as in the monograph which Mrs. Anne Gilchrist has just 
contributed to the Famous Women Series. Darkly hinted at by Talfourd in his 
Final Memorials of Charles Lamb, it became better known as the years went on 
and that imperfect work was followed by fuller and franker biographies, — became 
so well known, in fact, that no one could recall the memory of Lamb without 
recalling at the same time the memory of his sister." — New York Mail and Ex- 
press. 

" A biography of Mary Lamb must inevitably be also, almost more, a biogra- 
phy of Charles Lamb, so completely was the life of the sister encompassed by 
that of her brother ; and it must be allowed that Mrs. Anne Gilchrist has per- 
formed a difficult biographical task with taste and ability. . . . The reader is at 
least likely to lay down the book with the feeling that if Mary Lamb is not famous 
she certainly deserves to be, and that a debt of gratitude is due Mrs. Gilchrist for 
this well-considered record of her life." — Boston Courier. 

*' Mary Lamb, who was the embodiment of everything ,that is tenderest in 
woman, combined with this a heroism which bore her on for a while through the 
terrors of insanity. Think of a highly intellectual woman struggling year after 
year with madness, triumphant over it for a season, and then at last succumbing to 
it. The saddest lines that ever were written are those descriptive of this brother and 
sister just before Mary, on some return of insanity, was to leave Charles Lamb. 
' On one occasion Mr. Charles Lloyd met them slowly pacing together a little 
foot-path in Hoxton F'ields, both weeping bitterly, and found, on joining them, 
that they were taking their solemn way to the accustomed asylum.' What pathos 
is there not here ? " — New York Times. 

" This life was worth writing, for all records of weakness conquered, of pain 
patiently borne, of success won from difficulty, of cheerfulness in sorrow and 
affliction, make the world better. Mrs. Gilchrist's biography is unaffected and 
simple. She has told the sweet and melancholy story with judicious sympathy, 
showing always the light shining through darkness." — Philadelphia Press. 



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the price, by the Publishers, 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



MESSES. EOBEETS BEOTHEES' PUBLICATIONS. 

JTamous fKHamen ^txit^. 
GEORGE ELIOT. 

By MATHILDE BLIND. 
One vol. i6mo. Cloth. Price, $i.oo. 



" Messrs. Roberts Brothers begin a series of Biographies of Famous 
Women with a Hfe of George Eliot, by Mathilde Blind. The idea of th4 
series is an excellent one, and the reputation of its publishers is a guarantee 
for its adequate execution. This book contains about three hundred pages in 
open type, and not only collects and condenses the main facts that are known 
in regard to the history of George Eliot, but supplies other material from 
j)ersonal research. It is agreeably written, and with a good idea of propo»- 
tion in a memoir of its size. The critical study of its subject's works, whicl 
is made in the order of their appearance, is particularly well done. In fact, 
good taste and good judgment pervade the memoir throughout." — Saturday 
Evening Gazette. 

" Miss Blind's little book is written with admirable good taste and judg- 
ment, and with notable self-restraint. It does not weary the reader with 
critical discursiveness, nor with attempts to search out high-flown meanings 
and recondite oracles in tlie plain 'yea' and ' nay ' of life. It is a graceful 
and unpretentious little biography, and tells all that need be told concerning 
one of the greatest writers of the time. It is a deeply interesting if not 
fascinating woman whom Miss Blind presents," says the New York 
Tribune. 

" Miss Blind's little biographical study of George Eliot is writteii with 
sympathy and good taste, and is very welcome. It gives us a graphic if not 
elaborate sketch of the personality and development of the great novelist, is 
particularly full and authentic concerning her earlier years, tells enough of 
the leading motives in her work to give the general reader a lucid idea of the 
true drift and purpose of her art, and analyzes carefully her various writings, 
with no attempt at profound criticism or fine writing, but with ajipreciation, 
insight, and a clear grasp of those underlying psychological principles which 
are so closely interwoven in every productiou that came from her pen." — 
Traveler. 

•' The lives of few great writers have attracted more curiosity and specula- 
tion than that of George Eliot. Had she only lived earlier in the century 
she might easily have become the centre of a mythos. As it is, many of the 
anecdotes commonly repeated about her are made up largely of fable. It is, 
therefcre, well, before it is too late, to reduce the true story of her career to 
the lowest terms, and this service has been well done by the author of the 
present volume." —Philadelphia Press. 

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price, by the publishers, 

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Messrs. Roberts Brothers' Publications. 
FAMOUS WOMEN SERIES. 



EMILY BRONTE. 

By a. MARY F. ROBINSON. 
One vol. 16mo. Cloth. Price, $1.00. 

" Miss Robinson has written a fascinating biography. . . . Emily Bronte is 
Interesting, not because she wrote ' Wuthering Heights,' but because of her 
brave, baffled, human Hfe, so lonely, so full of pain, but with a great hope shining 
beyond all the darkness, and a passionate defiance in bearing more than the 
burdens that were laid upon her. Tlie story of the three sisters is infinitely sad, 
but it is the ennobling sadness that belongs to large natures cramped and striving" 
for freedom to heroic, almost desperate, work, with little or no result. The author 
of this intensely interesting, sympathetic, and eloquent biography, is a young lady 
and a poet, to whom a place is given in a recent anthology of living English poets, 
which is supposed to contain only the best poems of the best writers." — Boston 
Daily A dvertiser. 

" Miss Robinson had many excellent qualifications for the task she has per- 
formed in this little volume, among which may be named, an enthusiastic interest 
in her subject and a real sympathy with Emily Bronte's sad and heroic life. 'To 
represent her as she was,' says Miss Robinson, ' would be her noblest and most 
fititmg monument.' . . . Emily Bronte here becomes well known to us and, in one 
sense, this should be praise enough for any biography." — New York Times. 

"The biographer who finds such material before him as the lives and characters 
of the Bronte family need have no anxiety as to the interest of his work. Char- 
acters not only stroiig but so uniquely strong, genius so supreme, misfortunes so 
overwhelming, set in its scenery so forlornly picturesque, could not fail to attract 
all readers, if told even in the most prosaic language. When we add to this, that 
Miss Robinson has told their 9Xox\ not in prosaic language, but with a literary* 
style exhibiting all the qualities essential to good biography, our readers will 
understand that this life of Emi!y Bronte is not only as interesting as a novel, but 
a great deal more interesting than most novels. As it presents most vividly a 
general picture of the family, there seems hardly a reason for giving it Emily's name 
alone, except perhaps for the masterly chajiters on • Wuihering Hei.i;hts,' which 
the reader will find a grateful condensation of the best in that powerful but some- 
what forbidding story. We know of no point in the Bronte history — their genius, 
their surrounding's, their faults, their happiness, their misery, their love and friend- 
ships, their peculiarities, their power, their gentleness, their patience, their pride, 
— wh.ch Miss Robinson has not touched upon with conscientiousness and sym- 
pathy." — The Critic. 

*" Emily Bronte ' is the seeond of the ' Famous Women Series,' which Roberts 
Brothers, Boston, propose to j^ublish, and of which ' George Eliot ' was the initial 
volume. Not the least remarkable of a very remarkable family, the personage 
whose life is here written, possesses a peculiar interest to all who are at all familiar 
with the sad and singular history of herself and her sister Charlotte. That the 
author, Miss A. Mary F. Robinson, has done her work with minute fidelity to 
facts as well as affectionate devotion to the subject of her sketch, is plainly to be 
seen all through the book." — Washington Post. 
♦ 

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price, by the Publishers, 

ROBERTS BROTHERS, Boston. 



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